east coast rambler

I have put thousands of miles on my car in this post-graduation summer. Broken promises, listened to hours of audiobooks and drank seltzer water to the point of bubbling over.

My endless wandering has been seemingly the only consistency in my life. The road is always there for me. It doesn’t matter the destination, or what I am running from, as long as I am running. I guess it’s not that I’m running from anything really. It’s that I’m afraid to stop running. You know how your legs, after a few miles, feel fluid--the motion a part of your subconscious.

I have begun to fear committing to one local.

Looming on the horizon lies August 12th. August 12th is the date I commit. I stop moving and start digging in. I will begin digging the trench that will, hopefully, become the foundation upon which I build my career. The less round-about way to spell it out is to say that I begin, officially, working on that date. I begin working, and although I have yet to truly define what my dream job is, I must begin to work as though it were my dream job. This mental state will help me wake up every morning. In the same bed. Take the same route to work. And feel satisfied by what I have accomplished that day, when I lay down to rest my head.

drinks with anne hathaway

The Public Theater Organization puts on shows in Central Park for free! In order to make money they are doing an auction. What they are auctioning off just makes me smile.

better at what cost?

Every year Apple drops news of its newest treasure during the much anticipated annual conference at which Jobs himself gives a speech. The new iPhone is soon to arrive much to the joy of those who have 200 bucks to drop on gadgets.

While the excitement created each year guarantees PR for the company it also presents the threat of a total flop for the new gadget when it cannot out-do the release of the previous year or meet the high expectations of those in waiting.

The continuity of such releases also presents a problem in the long run because it may train consumers to expect new releases and not spend money on the previous models in the months leading up to the new release.

Aside from potential issues for Apple, what will we do with the growing trash piles of phones left for the new models?

cultural standpoints

My strategy class at the Brandcenter put together a series of white papers we are calling Cultural Standpoints. Each team or individual writer chose a topic to research and dissect how the trend at hand could influence consumers or brands. We hope that this is the first of many Cultural Standpoint books to come out of the strategy classes at the VCU Brandcenter.

Open publication - Free publishing - More standpoints

Here is a link to the book: http://issuu.com/partesotti/docs/cultural_standpoints_final

60/60

Here we are. 60 weeks in our pockets. 60 of the craziest and best weeks of our lives. It wouldn't have been as meaningful for me if it weren't shared with such amazing people. Thank you to the professors and to the 85 others that I graduated with. You'll always be my family no matter how far apart we may find ourselves.

Here's a short flick that Les Green and I put together. Thank you Jay Adams for helping us find photos. The music is "Daylight" by Matt & Kim.

publicity stunt creating new agency payment model?

BBH Labs wasn't hiring, so they told Hank Leber to start his own agency. And so, he did. A recent graduate of the VCU Brandcenter, Hank has been hard on the job search for a couple months now. He decided to start his own agency as a publicity stunt but now that he is gaining a lot of potential clients, at least he'll have some freelance type work to do while he looks for something long-term.

Welcome the new AgencyNil, headlined as "cheaper than freelance, better than interns."
Leber's strategy is basically to under-bid, majorly. On the site he says that they will do the work, then the client decides what they will pay for it.


I'm really interested to see what Hank's next move is. Will he be hired by an agency for his ingenuity? Or will AgencyNil become the next hot-shop to watch and Hank's permanent deal?

why i love lookbook

I've decided to start a new series on my blog called "why i love..." Not sure how often these will roll out. The last time I did one of these was on Kid Robot. But, with no further delay...

Why I love LookBook.nu

I recently decorated a tri-fold as a piece to introduce myself, the parts of culture that I love as well as a trivia game on those parts of culture. As it goes with tri-folds, it was for a science fair, of sorts, in which myself and my fellow students were the experiments on display. It was the annual Brandcenter recruiter fair and I was the nerd with the tri-fold.

One of the areas of culture that I hit on was fashion and as my board said "Fashion trends in the near future will not be determined by high-end designers, but by your 18 year-old neighbor with an armful of cloth and a camera."

Living, photographic proof of that is Lookbook.nu. LookBook calls itself the "collective fashion consciousness." It's a collection of photographs, submitted by members, of people in different outfits they have assembled.

Lookbook is truly brilliant because...

1. It scrolls down endlessly. You never hit the bottom of the page while scrolling through "looks," which means you could peruse it non-stop for 40 minutes (no, seriously).

2. "Hyping" looks - A quick and painless (i.e. it won't send you to another window, just takes a click) way to show your love for a certain look.

3. Exclusivity. You have to be invited to be a member in order to "hype" looks. And exclusivity makes people feel as though they belong to something elite, special. Something to be proud of and write long blogposts about.

4. Not only does it take the creativity of putting pieces together, but an acumen of photography to really earn a lot of "hypes." So in other words, this site combines two parts of culture that I love.

5. It showcases the best of young design trend navigators. Some of the members on here are 15 and posting a maturity of style that would have knocked the 15 year-old pig-tail laden me into a locker.

6. Global.

7. Look descriptions - "Looks" are posted along with the title of look, name, age, location and general description of the person. Some examples:



And that is why I love LookBook.nu. Let me show you some looks and who knows, maybe you'll love LookBook too.

silence the stain

Just watched "Funniest Office Commercials" on TBS. The #1 spot was...

love. actually.

I've never had a lot of trouble letting go. I've moved quite a bit in my life and met a lot of people (I have more than 1300 facebook friends and only about 5 of them are strangers that friended me and I wasn't sure if I knew them.)

But I am becoming increasingly aware as graduation nears, that the Brandcenter is going to be the hardest thing i've ever had to let go of.

I guess the real reason why I've never had trouble letting go is because I never believed that anything was permanent from the beginning. I start phases of my life with a clear understanding that it has an ending. And although I knew the Brandcenter was a 2 year program, I am realizing that the friendships that I have made here will be ones I hold onto indefinitely. These people will be constantly coming in and out of my life because 1. it's a small industry and 2. in the U.S. there are basically 4 big cities we'll be concentrated in. L.A., San Fran, Chicago and NYC.

New york being the biggest for our industry and because I know I'll always have friends there and because I lived there last summer, it's the one I feel most comfortable moving to. I love new york. Really. It surprised me, but it happened, I fell in love.

I guess that's my problem in general, love. Falling in love with the Brandcenter, it's people and the drive it gives me. Falling in love with the inspiration that I get from NYC. Love is a problem because it's hard to shrug off and move past.

strike a pose

Read two posts about poses that people strike for their Facebook/MySpace profiles that are hilarious.

The first is by my friend Alex Aloise for Blommit.com, a website where 7 dudes all respond to a single topic that's chosen by readers every week.
Check out the link, he's got a bunch of them, I'm hoping he makes it into a book someday.

The other was on my new favorite blog (of this week anyways): 2birds1blog.

en vogue

My fashion presentation was featured on the fashion section of slideshare.com the other day. I uploaded it three days ago and as of now it's had 139 views. Not bad. I'm a little worried it's not as followable without the voice-over, but I did a damn good job art directing that presentation and don't want to kill it by adding bullet points of what was said. Bullet points are the route of all evil.

Fashion Presentation

View more presentations from Katie Fitzgerald.

fisi

Here's a new techie vocab word for ya. FISI, pronounced like fizzy, stands for: fuck it, ship it.

It's used by web designers when they have been working on a site for a client and come to realize that they could sit there and toggle left and right forever. They know that they can make small changes later, after the site has launched. So they say it, fuck it, send this off to the client.

random and weird

I am having the strangest luck. A week ago my car was side-swiped, luckily I wasn't in the car, it was just parked on my street. However, the result was a broken mirror and I can't open my drivers side door. (You can just imagine the looks I've been getting as I climb in through the passenger side...)

Today I was meeting my insurance guy to assess the damage, I walked outside and what to my wandering eyes should appear, but I've just (luckily) missed a big car crash on the corner of 1st and Grace. The crash literally happened around my car and somehow my car didn't get hit. I'm not sure how the crash went down, but an old lady went up onto the sidewalk and into a fence. Had she not veered (or been pushed, I don't know) right, she would have slammed into the back of my car and my car would have gone into the brand new BMW parked in front of me.

Here's where the situation gets random. Sitting in my car, waiting for the insurance guy to finish typing up the report, I see a group of five round the corner. I'm watching them walk and talk and suddenly realize that I know one of them! It's Frank Gregory! Frank is an Adcenter alum and I met him through a mutual friend this summer in NYC. Frank and his friends are in town for the CAA Basketball tournament and staying at the hotel that is next to my building!

So weird. A strange mixture of good luck and bad luck. Hoping anymore strange events that decide to go down today will be good ones.

wacktastic

Got the hair did today and found my new favorite salon. It's called Wack Salon, the conversation is of bar names and films with too many endings (think the last LOTR). They have a salon dog and the owner's philosophy on work is: if feels like a job, get out.

When Wack owner Lee realized that he saw soo many single people he figured he may as well set them up. So he created the "Hot Lover" Facebook group. The idea is, you identify yourself as a hot lover and see if there is anyone else in the group you'd be interested in going on a date with. Once you find someone, you meet at Wack, chill at a table in the back, drink champagne and have your hair styled/blown out all on the house.

Although no one has ever done it, I think it's a cool experimental concept. And if you're tired of the bar scene, why not?

"Brazil, Russia, India, and China — already cooler than you"

Quick post while I watch my website load sloooowly. Just discovered this site called BRIC Pop. As their headline puts it: "The next 40 years of global pop culture will be built with four BRICs." Should be a great resources for all those in Global Branding this semester. Seems to have a lot to explore.

This gives me an idea. What if we did a set of 4 documentaries, each introducing one of the BRICs. It would be like Travel Channel meets the Economist... maybe after they've each had a few drinks. Could be fun to explore as side project after getting a job!