<3 the new Ray Ban stuff

I’m loving the new Ray Ban stuff at the moment…

Filed under: Advertising & Branding, Arts & Culture, Design, Ideas, Inspiration, Nostalgia, TV Spot

Layer Tennis: Battle of the Cursors

We recently discovered a community of designers competing in a sport known as Layer Tennis. This is a battle of wits, design know-how, and time management. And yes, you can get injured. Here’s our inaugural match of Layer Tennis.

The rules of Layer Tennis are simple. Competitors are given 15 minutes to design something on the fly according to a theme. With each subsequent round, each designer must take an element or two from the previous round and embellish upon it. Usually matches last 10 rounds, but since this is our first time, we made it a four round bout. Essentially, this is like a freestyle rap battle where both sides trade jabs with hot keys instead of rhymes.

Our theme: Summer.

Let’s battle.

Round 1: Derek

Round 2: Justin

Round 3: Derek

Final Round: Justin

And there you have it. A relentlessly stressful and intense match of Layer Tennis. Decisions were made until the last seconds. Blood, sweat, tears, and Red Bull were shed. The time constraint made us cut corners, resulting in shoddy photoshop jobs, stupidity, and hilarious ideas. We’re happy with the results.

Lessons learned from Layer Tennis:
1. Have your favorite fonts fired up and ready.
2. Making selections will kill your clock.
3. So will your futile search for stock images.

There will be more matches to come. Thank you for watching.

Filed under: Competitions, Design, Humor, Inspiration

This might make you cry

wow.

Filed under: Arts & Culture, Inspiration

Summer time and the living isn’t easy

Many of you are spending the long drawn out months of summer to revamp, recreate, or start your portfolio from scratch. When building a website, a few questions come to mind. What do you want the user to walk away knowing? What is the first thing they should see? How will they navigate through your page and what is the importance of this? Above all, what do you want your portfolio to say about you? Take a look at some inspirational sites to guide your answers to these questions, and let’s Make Better Websites.

Filed under: Ideas, Inspiration, Uncategorized

A FELLOW MAD MEN FOUND THIS…

Weight-Revealing Billboard Shames Fatties into Joining Gym

Filed under: Advertising & Branding, Ambient, Arts & Culture, Humor, Inspiration

“The Other I”

Filed under: Inspiration

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!

Back from the One Show, and it feels good to be out of the rain!

Congratulations: The Academy did an amazing job with 2 wins in the Innovative category out of 15 participants, all who received merit awards for their submissions.

This is the first time that the Academy has had this large of a representation in such a prominent competition as the One Show and it’s only going to get better.

We had an amazing time networking and getting to know students of advertising from all over the world. Practices have been shared, knowledge has been bestowed, and we’ve come back to SF with a stronger mentality and creative drive to make our work better than it ever has been.

We’ve got a lot of great pictures to show you guys from the awards ceremony not only to document, but to inspire each and everyone of our students to aim higher with our work and create furiously for these competitions.

Check back later for more details on who won, and what they did to win it.

Pictures soon!

Filed under: Advertising & Branding, Competitions, Inspiration, School related, Academy of Art University, Advertising, School of Advertising, The One Show

The Avatars of Human Creativity

Astronaut, doctor, art collector, dancer, … Mae Jemison shares her wish to create bold thinkers by teaching arts and sciences together.

 

 

This TED made me think of how I consider “the big men” of the history people like Leonardo da Vinci and Louis Pasteur. [read more]

-the apopotamus

Filed under: Arts & Culture, Design, Ideas, Inspiration

The World Is Our Oyster

Great thought provoking post from Paul Isakson:

In this video, Emily Haines, from the band Metric, touches on one of the major themes felt around the world right now – a large cloud of uncertainty and doubt hangs over many people’s head.

People are questioning much of what they felt good about before.They are considering giving up on things they’ve been doing for years. They’re not sure where to go or what to do next. They are searching for answers and help…

The world is a scary place right now. Agency models are broken. The whole industry is shifting. So, should we be scared?

On the contrary. This is probably the most exiting time ever to be in the field of marketing and advertising. We have chance to turn this whole industry around. Let’s go out there and actually make a difference!

So how do we go about that?

As an industry, we have to stop just looking for ways to “build brands” through messaging and start looking for ways to actually help people have better days and build better lives.

There’s never been a better time to start thinking differently and start thinking bigger.

Filed under: Advertising & Branding, Arts & Culture, Inspiration

The Secret to Great Presentations

The secret to making a great presentation:

Figure out what the one thing is. The one change you want people to make as a result of your presentation. Make sure your audience knows you love them, gain their respect and then do only what’s necessary to sell your audience on the one thing.

[via SAMBA]

Filed under: Ideas, Inspiration