INTERNSHIP VC 09!

This past winter I had the privilege of interning as a creative team with Jen at Mcgarry bowen in New York City. The agency started up in 2002 when three guys at Y&R decided to leave and set up their own shop doing advertising their own way. Since then, it’s grown to house around 200 employees (one of which used to be Ann Lemon!) and opened a second office out in Chicago. The agency represents a pretty long list of clients.. Marriott, Reebok, Disney, Chase, Kraft and Crayola to name a few. Among others, they did the Annie Leibovitz Disney campaign which has been one of my favorite things for a long time, so I was pretty pumped to be hanging around there for a month. The agency is located in the heart of Chelsea in this funky old factory building that borders the Hudson River. I managed to craigslist an apartment 5 blocks away so it ended up being a very sweet deal. We were there working for a woman named Sandy Bell (Ann’s old boss I believe!) who was really sweet to us the entire time. The first day she told us, “I’m not sure why, but I feel excited for you guys too.” We started out working on a Renaissance Marriott rebranding campaign under Creative Director Warren Eakins (who is a bit of an ad legend.. he’s definitely got a whole lot of pencils.) The agency was given the assignment of entirely rebranding the hotel and giving a somewhat characterless chain it own unique identity. The whole idea of it was to make Renaissance the place for the exploring businessman… the kind of guy who’s 5-9 is more important than his 9-5, and the kind of guy who is going to embrace the atmosphere around him even if he did just happen to end up there for a business trip. The assignment included everything from logo redesign to interior decorating, color schemes, copy-writing, ideas about different features the hotel could offer to its clients, the kind of artwork that would go up on the walls... It definitely encompassed many more elements than I thought advertising included. We did all kinds of different mood boards following the words “inspiring, indigenous, independent” and definitely learned how to present ideas in a more professional level. The deadline on this assignment got pushed back a bit after we got there so we only really got to contribute to the brainstorming phase (and ended up spending far more time brainstorming than we thought possible) but it was definitely good experience to learn how to truly work in a team and how to go about presenting your ideas collaboratively. The second project we worked on was an identity assignment for the agency. Because Crayola is one of their primary clients, someone had come up with this idea of making a coloring book that they could give to clients or prospective clients with a page or two for all of their existing clients. We worked on the project for the creative director for Crayola, Tom Pratt, along with another art director Rachel and the other intern, this guy named Paolo who was in for three months with Miami Ad School. Upon leaving we had a pretty finalized version of a 40 page book completed. The project was fun because we basically got to do whatever we wanted for each client and we got to work on/snoop on all of the accounts. I was surprised to see how much they appreciated illustration skills.. and I definitely improved on my Illustrator skills as a result. Tom Pratt was very very sweet to us also and had basically any and all Crayola products in his office so we got to play with those (which included 3-d drawing chalk.. crazy ish.) While it might have been nice to have a UD alumni watching over us, everyone was extremely friendly and welcoming the entire time and we heard some pretty interesting stories about Ann! It was also cool to experience the advertising environment… the agency really made an effort to make it feel like a little creative community with monthly concerts, birthday parties and agency meetings where they introduce new faces and show off the different work that was being released. All in all, it was a very valuable experience. Living in New York definitely got pretty expensive… I ate a whole lot of Raman noodles, the free Cheerios they had for us in the kitchen and whatever scraps were left from amazing catered food for the clients but learning about how an agency really works and how to handle myself in the city was definitely worth it.

Anyway, just a few closing thoughts about what I learned while at Mb:
In the past month I have learned that I consume far more coffee than any person ever should, that I am extremely claustrophobic (thank you morning elevator rides), and that headphones are an absolute necessity in the workplace. I also learned that entire days really can be spent surfing the internet, weeks spent tweaking simple lay-outs and that a month can go by in the blink of an eye. I learned what it takes to build brands, brainstorm until well after the sun goes down and make great ads. While at Mcgarrybowen, I was lucky enough to receive the insights of some extraordinarily talented people, however, for me, the most rewarding aspect came out of insights I was able to discover about myself. Everyone at the agency came from such different backgrounds; no one seemed to have taken a clear-cut route to where they sit today. It really is an agency, and an industry, of explorers. While I have contemplated various wheres and whats of my life for years, I saw that the best thing that I can do for myself is to stop forcing answers to questions. If I’m doing what I love to do, a direction will follow. I’m not afraid of the future anymore. Maybe it was hearing the advice of people who have been where I am today, or hearing how they got from point a to point b; maybe it was proving to myself that I can enter a completely foreign environment and still hold my own, or maybe it was simply getting over my fear of the morning elevator. At any rate, I’ve gained a confidence in the future I have in store for me.

Website is mcgarrybowen.com … check it out!

digiscape

Landscapes have been portrayed in the fine arts for centuries; and while scenery has changed, society has developed and cities have industrialized, the basic fundamentals have stayed the same. Perspective has repeated itself over and over again regardless of the time or scene depicted. However, in today’s digital world, a new scape has taken the scene that completely changes our literal definition of space. The internet is used to connect millions of people and spread uncountable amounts of data, yet it only exists in some unseen world. It is perhaps the largest space we can imagine and the smallest space we can see. It is a space that is always changing; it is never static and it can’t be contained to a given place or time. With my piece, I wanted to try to inhabit this transitional space and visualize its conversation of information. One notable effect of the internet is how impersonal the world has become. This device that makes such elaborate connections throughout the world seems to have severed our emotional ties to one another. One person can read about another without any interaction at all: news stories become another byline on the news ticker and personal identities blur into a mess of words on a screen available to anyone at any time. I wanted to emphasize this cultural truth in my interpretation of today’s ‘digi-scape.’ A digital print is concrete; it exists within a two-dimensional space at any given time. In complete contrast, a digi-scape can’t be captured in any specific moment. Instead, it has this bizarre collection of time: its present is only evidence of the past and its future can only spawn from the present (once the present becomes the past.) I guess the role we play is lost somewhere in the middle. I started to view this process as a cycle of passing time. My landscape is a sequence, yet it ends where it started. In so much, its path is linear, like time, but nothing really changes. We don’t know how the internet will change in the future, but emotional distance probably won’t.

Olivier Blanc

illustrator known for incorporating graphics and photography.. some work incorporating landscapes is posted below

a future unfolding

Infinite motion

The thought of the infinite print has led me on a bit of a tangent into ideas about infinite motion. I find it interesting how where we are all going is just an infinite continuation of where we have come from, and in a way, becomes the same type of 'circulation of information' that the article we read talked about. I was originally looking at a lot of actual infinite images that circle back again and again (M.C. Esher etc.) and some textile design work, and have decided to try to incorporate the two through the examination of the movement of the body. While I'm not sure how this will translate into an infinite print yet (as of right now it's in a somewhat extensive book format that would not be easy for anyone to print), I'm hoping that by layering each 'strand of motion' some interesting patterning might occur that could be repeated again and again. At any rate, it's led to some different results that I can play with. If that doesn't pan out, I've also been thinking about chain letters, and how I could create a similar means of circulation through a mailer, and was considering reworking a design for a fortune cookie I had been working on a little bit ago.. again sort of speaking to the infinite places we can go.

With my screenprint, I wanted to make a commentary on society's inverted value of beauty and how much the things we deem beautiful are a manipulation of society and how much of it is predetermined by nature's creation of mathematical perfection (referenced through the screenprint overlay of Golden ratios.) An extension of these thoughts could lead to linking the seemingly unnatural hierarchy of beauty to the natural creations of the world. I am hoping to use this image in some form on an artist's book I've been working on which has turned into something of a 'Best in Show' of the Miss America pageant.


For the second project, I have been thinking about the idea of the infinite in terms of its real existence in the world.. ie space, black holes and other cosmic elements. I've been looking at some of Peter Saville's work, especially his album cover of a black hole..

Manipulation of a beauty queen

For this project, I want to explore the idea of manipulated beauty. While I started out referencing a lot of advertisements for this project, I realized that manipulated images can do a lot more than sell a product. Manipulation can serve as a medium for the expression of any voice, not just a brand. Here, I wanted to make a statement on how our concept of beauty in the United States is greatly misinterpreted through the glorification of pageant queens and Barbie dolls.. and to maybe suggest a darker side to an image that has come to mean perfection in society today. While I'm not yet set on the above image (and have been planning to incorporate some illustrative elements into the image, particularly in the portrayal of the crown), this is the direction I've been exploring thus far.