26.10.08
Your Stodgy Print Portfolio
A few print and branding samples, 2001-2008. If you want interaction, web and Flash, you will need to go another link.
Above: sample front/back spread for a customizable 8- or 16-page client newsletter, 2007. Part of an online web-to-print project for which I created the Quark and xml templates. Clients could select articles, images, and other elements, then review a pdf before pulling the trigger and ordering (say) 10,000 copies to be maillisted out next Tuesday.
Detail of an FMA Card collateral piece for SB Advertising, early 2005.
If the design schema looks vaguely familiar, that could be because it was reflecting the neat-as-pin tiny-type layouts then current in web design. Case in point: the Movable Type blog you're looking at, which dates from the same period.
The style worked for blogs and posters and advertisements, but not for newsletters, which had to look messy and interesting so people would read the copy. E.g., the Accel piece below:
One of a series of covers I did for bond-research books, 2001-2006:
This looks very old:
This was just silly. As they said in The Twilight Zone, It's a Cookbook!
Detail of elaborate display, Investment Banking in Silicon Valley:
One of many web icons and branding elements I created, replaced, reworked or whatever:
Something about Microsoft and SCO vs Linux and Open Source?
I created 30 or 40 logos for Smith Barney alone. This one was current for a couple of years, then we flipped the corporate ID and used a different one for the next two years:
Business cards. A bar, a bank, a brokerage:
Bits of corporate-identity branding guides I created with SB Advertising and the Sterling Group:
ANCIENT CURIO. I thought I had lost all my old designs and press cuttings in The Fire, but I was wrong. A few things still bubble up on occasion. Below, here's something positively ancient, from the early 90s, when I was a working journalist on the West Coast and moonlighted as an editorial illustrator. This is supposed to be Michael Lutin, Vanity Fair's camp astrologer.
Posted by Margot at 16:55 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
24.10.08
No Professionals Need Apply
It is gradually dawning on me that when recruiters and hiring managers ask to see my portfolio, they don't actually want to see real work that I've done. "Portfolio" has nothing to do with the real world. "Portfolio" isn't about professional work. "Portfolio" is rather a shiny gewgaw that they teach you to assemble in commercial-art school, and which you continue to polish up every day of your life.
I never went to commercial-art school (unless you count a half-dozen CE courses at School of Visual Arts) so I am at a disadvantage here. A double disadvantage, actually, since I am incapable of regarding a commercial-art BFA or MFA as a genuine degree.
I'm not being a Gradgrind here. I don't regard MBA school as "real" graduate school either.
It reminds me of a story from my friend Bret, about her own days in commercial-art school. She went to SVA. She shared a place in Hoboken with a Cooper Union girl. Now, SVA and Cooper Union are about as different from each other as you can get and still be called an art school. The School of Visual Arts is frankly, utterly commercial. That's what makes it so neat: people go there to learn a trade, so they can get a leg up into advertising and media. Lots of practice, little theory. But Cooper Union, like most elite colleges and universities, has loftier goals: it aims to provide an education.
Anyway, Bret was in her last semester at SVA and feverishly perfecting her Portfolio for review by her faculty advisor. The Cooper Union girl wondered if she should be working on her Portfolio too. So she asked one of her teachers, and the teacher just laughed airily and said, "Oh, at Cooper Union we're not about Portfolios."
I don't know if there's a moral here. I think it's just a story.
Posted by Margot at 19:42 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
22.10.08
Classic Movable Type from 2004
I collected all sorts of blogware a few years ago, experimented with them, and then left them idle. Now I can accomplish the near-impossible feat of bringing you a brand-new site on antiquated and generally unavailable software. This is what a standard Movable Type or TypePad blog might have looked like four years ago. Maybe you know someone who still has one!
Posted by Margot at 20:44 | Comments (0)