If you’re Ram Trucks—an American icon—and you have a lineup of 5 of today’s hottest country music stars, who better to give a look to your 2012 concert series than the visual embodiment of American music itself—the inimitable Hatch Show Print. Hatch has been designing and printing concert posters in the heart of Nashville for over 130 years, and their hand-set letterpress style is every bit as much of an icon in my mind as the artists they’ve promoted. So,…

May sound kind of weird but Moleskine actually reconnected me with an artistic portion of my soul, lost to a management role and it’s responsibilities: department planning, staffing, resource management, pitching, presenting, and directing. My CD role simply didn’t require my drawing skills. I no longer needed to create comps or storyboards. I didn’t need to supplement my designs with hand-drawn elements. so I just stopped drawing pictures. Instead I produced hundreds of doodles. Completely disposable doodles. After encountering a…

That time of year again, South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, the time where thousands of uber nerds gather together in Austin for the Mardi Gras of Geekdom but without the beads and bare chests… mostly. Fortunately we were able to pack up our pocket protectors and our taped together glasses and blend in with the best of them. For us the event didn’t disappoint; here are our three lists of five bests. 5 Best Sessions at SXSW 1. Show & Smell: Marketing…

Coke recently released an animated, two-part, video declaration of its intent to augment it’s creative process, output, and partnerships across it’s key brands. It’s humbling to say the least. The videos demonstrate Coke’s understanding of “the new media landscape” and states its need for new agencies: agencies that can help their clients iteratively build brands with the continual creation of meaningful content in different forms. While we’ve worked hard to position ourselves for this exact opportunity, we couldn’t have articulated…

We recently wrapped our broadcast campaign for the Just Dance 3 campaign: a bunch of broadcast and videos built out of a collection of UGC from around the world. During a 6 month production spree we created a 90second trailer for E3, a :60 Trailer for the Kinect announcement, a :60 online trailer, two :30 spots and two :15 second spots for the US, and three :30 spots and about 20 different customized localizations for 10 different countries. Most exhausting…

I just watched Objectified, a documentary by Gary Hustwit, about the role of an industrial designer in the mind-blowing process of mass-producing everyday objects. While the film is about industrial design, it presented a practice and term that we interactive designers should embrace and use: prototype design. Below: Trailer for Objectified Industrial designers approach product design in an iterative manner (much like software designers). They may design with the hopes of creating a single manufacture-ready prototype, but they all know…