A Shameless Blog

The Acorn is a coffee shop in Portland that never ceases to make me happy. They pull a mean espresso and they’re quick on the draw with fresh banter. In addition to that, they make the sweetest business cards. All handmade, all awesome. Some of my favorites are by Little Jeff (Big Jeff being the owner.) I can’t really sum up exactly why I like these (not in coherent sentences anyway) but I spent about 5 minutes going through their thick stack of cards going “WHA!” “YES!” Whoaaaaa.” “Sweet!” and so on. Today I picked up the one on the bottom with the eyeball, hotdog(?) and frog riding the mystic pyramid.

Let’s take a closer look:

Apparently my blog silence wasn’t meant for too long. Figured I’d throw a picture in from my shoot with Matt yesterday. Behold, more fake work environments. More chaotic, perhaps a little closer to the real way I work, exception being that I try not to have only my own work up on the wall, that being narcissistic. However, I do like working with a mirror right above my monitor, so I might gaze upon myself whilst creating. Sure.

Point being: not my real workspace.

Finished piece will be done towards the end of the week and then I’ll share.

They’re everywhere! Yay!

Been working to compile all the info I’ve gotten from doing this networking experiment thing together and it’s been sucking the life out of this blog. I don’t intend for that to last too long. I will have plenty to post and share soon, just had a really great photo shoot with my talented and generous photographer friend Matt. I’ll get some of the results up soon but for now expect a little bit of silence.

Above is a moment in time from my caffine/donut fueled adventures with my friend Tom’s box of reader-board type. Not exactly the best lighting but the fact that it’s reader-board type should more than make up for it. I like how the period looks almost like an exclamation mark. Perhaps it’s more like restrained excitement.

Have you played with this yet? Do it!
It’s fascinating and serves well for distracting yourself between writing hello letters
to various design firms.

They gave me a sticker!

So I went to Dmob’s monthly designer meet up for the first time a week or so ago. Overall it was enjoyable, though in terms of making future employment connections, I’d rank this months meeting pretty low. That’s not to say that I didn’t meet some great people, it’s a good place to connect with other designers and share a pint.

The location they chose for this month’s meeting was a little off the mark I thought. We were at the Thirsty Lion which is a sports bar downtown and this particular evening there was a big Oregon Duck’s game on TV. So in one part of the bar you have all these semi-nerdy designers semi-nervously putting themselves out there and all throughout the rest of the place you have these raging football fans. The designers would be happily chatting away when all of a sudden something would happen during the game and the bar would erupt, leaving the designers looking around bewildered. Actually I kinda liked that part of the whole thing, made the whole event entertaining.

It looked something like this:

Except we were all wearing clothes and most of us had hair.

Moving on…

The other day I downloaded and assembled this guy:

He’s a Readymech deigned by Siggi Eggertsson and the brainchild of the fine people at Fwis, a local design firm here in Portland. If you want your own, go check out the Readymech site.

Oh those nervous interview sweats!
This post is a little overdue, too busy making goat gifs.

So much to my surprise, hard work does pay off. The day after I sent out my
mailers I got an email from the wonderful people at Makelike. This is great seeing
that they’re one of my top firms to work for. Small, creatively diverse, and they
have a croquet team.

Already went in and talked to them, they have a beautiful open studio with a kitchen and two highly affable dogs. The interview was really chilled out, we just sat around a big table and the three designers quietly went through my work. Perhaps too quietly for me at that moment because I started talking…a lot. So much nervous talking, blah blah blah. Nervous talking and petting of dogs, nervously.

They’re not hiring but they mentioned freelance such and such which I’m totally fine with and they’ll hopefully take me up on.

Then there was the other mailer induced hello from Opus Creative. Another very workable-for firm. Haven’t set up an interview yet, but soon, soooon!
I hope they have dogs there…

All this self promotion, networking la-dee-da has got me a little burned out.
Here’s what I did to blow off some steam.

My house-mate brought out a box from the basement, it was full of these little
plastic animals from when she was but a wee naked child running around the farm.
I’d like to see more ambitious things happen with these little guys but for now,
my amateur animations will have to do.

Rar!

Sweetgifs.com is a newborn site organized by some really great people.
It’s awesome and fun and only sure to get better.

That said…here’s my contribution. Inspired by a friend’s allergic reaction.

I printed my mailer with Erik of OkayOkayOkay and he did a killer job with it.
While I was there, I picked up a couple test prints that we used to get the process started. Check them out, they’re pretty sweet! In addition to my print, you can see several other posters that he’s worked on.

You should check out his site, it’s a crowd pleaser!

Andrew Reed of Leopold Ketel was passing these around.
I need self promotion materials like this.

Had a good time last night, met some really nice people and danced A LOT.

Lesson of the Evening: Don’t mix red wine and whiskey (EVER) even if it’s free…
you always end up paying. (ha!)

It was held at the Portland Armory which looks like this:

Fans-E!

I ate some tiny food things, drank some big drink things, talked to a few people and got a little bored with the awards ceromony. I’m not really one for sitting still anyway. Nothing really disasterous or outrageous happened, so I won’t get into the details.
I’ll only say that Sandstrom Design and Weiden+Kennedy cleaned up last night.
I think that was to be expected though…