Solstice Advertising Art Director Laura Tauke took first place at this year’s AIGA Alaska Design Slam competition.
What did her achievement entail?
On-the-spot creativity –Competitors don’t even know what they are designing until the timer starts.
Quick Action – Competitors only have 45 minutes to create a masterpiece.
Over-the-shoulder pressure –Spectators circulate around designers, watching their design process.
Favoritism –the audience determines the final winner by vote.
This year’s competition was designing a poster to raise awareness of the nonprofit, Imagination Library, which encourages youth and their parents to read more. Competitors use computers loaded with Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop to create their 8.5 x 11 design.
Laura took the word “Imagination” from the nonprofit’s name to inspire the visuals in her design, from the words to colors and images. Her youthful, energetic design is attention grabbing for all ages, while promoting the organization’s benefits and mission.
In addition to personal gratification, Laura received a $200 gift card to the Apple Store. Congratulations Laura! We know you can handle any design hot seat with your cutting-edge, creative capabilities.
As a teenager I meticulously lined every square inch of my bedroom walls with different images, ads, celebrity photos and Rolling Stone covers, creating one large collage of inspiration, color and Gavin Rossdale. Through the years I have always had some sort of inspiration “wall” to cover and have collected everything from hot fashion styles and designers to cool ideas, interesting quotes and thought provoking images. So, I guess with my newest obsession, Pinterest, I could claim I’ve been “pinning” for decades – just not online.
Pinterest is one of the hottest new trends in social media and the marketing world is now starting to catch on to it’s potential. This “virtual inspiration board” has been gaining popularity among women and has big potential for brands with this target market.
Pinterest earned a spot on Time magazine’s “50 Best Websites of 2011” list and attracted 17.8 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S in February 2012 (which is up more than 4,000 percent from unique visitors last May – that’s right, four thousand percent), according to comScore Inc. Site visitors spend an average of an hour, so it is only natural that savvy marketers are finding ways to integrate it into their social strategies.
The key to successfully marketing on pin boards is to downplay traditional promotions and use it as a way to tell a larger story, the bigger picture. Connect your brand’s pins to similar areas of interest, inspirations and images of your target market, and throw a product or two in the mix to keep it relevant. Pinterest is a place for customers to explore, dream and organize, so be sure to align your strategy with the same thought processes.
To track Pinterest success, watch your number of followers, likes, comments and “repins” and keep your boards updated and current. Welcome to the new world of window shopping.
Three of the “Solstice Sisters,” as we now refer to ourselves, were honored to be guests of Calista at the Athena luncheon on Monday, April 2 at the Dena’ina Convention Center in Anchorage. We were fully unprepared for what we encountered at the luncheon – a room full of hundreds of successful mentors, leaders, mothers, sisters, and daughters all united under the common goal of making the world a better place.
As a program of the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, the Athena Society is a local chapter of an international organization dedicated to:
- supporting, developing and honoring women leaders,
- inspiring women to achieve their full potential, and
- creating balance in leadership worldwide.
To encourage the potential of women as valued members and leaders of our local business community, the Anchorage chapter added 11 new members to their already impressive roster, honoring Margie Brown of CIRI with the Athena Award for 2012.
As the bios were read of the new Athena inductees, I leaned over to Christine Klein of Calista, a member of Athena herself, and asked how in the world do these women find the time to do all that they do. The list of organizations and causes to which they dedicated energy, time and emotion to was endless. I was exhausted just listening, and of course, impressed. I left the room wanting to be a more productive member of society, a more involved citizen and a better mother, sister and friend.
Did you know that out of the 6 billion people on our planet, more own a mobile phone than a toothbrush? As an advertising agency, it’s our job to keep up on how people communicate with texts, tweets, telephones and more. We read the research, crunch numbers and observe communication trends which change daily. And while we love fresh data, one of our favorite ways of visualizing trends is through info-graphics. Here are links to some of our recent favorites:
At Solstice, we love a good logo. There is nothing more fulfilling than helping a company design the face of their business. In a state where the major areas of business that dominate our economy – healthcare, government contracting, issues and advocacy and natural resources – are saturated, it can be difficult for even the best creative teams to brand a business in a unique way. So where do we find inspiration?
LogoLounge is a must-have resource for inspiration. The goal of LogoLounge is to create a more efficient way for designers to find reference materials for logos. The online database is searchable by keywords, client and industry – making it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for to help jumpstart your creative project. And knowing what your client’s competitor’s logos look like sure is smart, too!
