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!

dear me, where'd you go?

Do you ever go back and read through old journal entries? A friend of mine, Johanna Beyenbach, just visited and reminded me of the first email I had ever written her. She said that it sounded so friendly and familiar, that she thought we had already met. I suppose I guilted her into writing me back. : ) Well, I went back and read through the email that I wrote her, along with a few others. And she was right, they were very friendly! I had been reading her column in Media Magazine for months and so when I wrote her, I felt like I already knew her. The thing is, I think I need to figure out how to inject that friendly spirit into all of my emails. It's strange, but I feel like that light-hearted person in me has died a little in the last 1.5 years of grad school. I guess I need to inject myself back into me before I can into emails.

Here's that email:

how do you apply your knowledge

In Peter Coughter's Account Leadership class today we had an honorable guest, Johanna Beyenbach from Naked Communications. Johanna, an Adcenter 06 graduate, spoke to us about getting a job. The conversation bounced around the room and one question in particular made me think. Alina asked "My 12 year old cousin has just as much cultural knowledge as I do and it has taken me longer to get here. Is the knowledge that we have really that valuable to agencies, or is pretty much everyone versed in culture." (That's not an exact quote, but pretty close).
Johanna responded by saying that it depends upon how you apply your cultural knowledge.

your media player never sounded so good

Nice example of remix culture.This guy took the Windows Media Player sounds and made them into a beat. He totally understands the art of self-promotion given the fact that half the lyrics talk about his blog. Just got to chat with Bud Cadell, Mike Arauz and Faris Yakob about remixing this weekend. Will post more about that soon.

sketchin' yo

Hall & Partners, a research firm, came and spoke to my strategy class. They were great, very inspiring with their take on research. One of the things that they hit on was this video from TED by Tim Brown, the CEO of Ideo. Brown proves through having the audience draw their neighbor in 30 seconds that we fear the judgement of our peers. At the end of the 30 seconds, the crowd was laughing from embarrassment and apologizing for their renditions. Brown says that if you do this experiment with children you will get a completely different respoonse. Kids will show their drawing to whomever will look. As kids grow older and hit puberty, they begin to fear that judgement. He says that you need that sense of security as an adult working in a creative business. We need to feel comfortable when showing our work to others.

This discussion was very relevant to me as that night I attended another Dr. Sketchy's drawing event. The theme was "the prom your mother warned you about." I decided to go ahead and post a couple of my drawings.


Next month's theme is "Betty Page tribute."