Friend & Johnson - Promo

Here's the piece I did for the latest Friend & Johnson promotion (my rep), to be mailed out within the next couple of weeks. It's another group promo, and is being used to tie into a relationship with the non-profit 826 Valencia:

"Founded in 2002 by author Dave Eggers and educator Nínive Calegari, 826 Valencia is dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their writing skills, and to helping teachers get their students excited about the writing. Our work is based on the understanding that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success and that great leaps in learning can be made when skilled tutors work one-on-one with students."
– 826valencia.org

So in addition to this being a normal promotional mailer, it will be donated to the organization for use by teachers to show students how visual people respond to words. The concept was to show the inspiration of language based on the single word "Edge". So each of the F&J artists worked out their own illustration of the word..

I decided to turn "Edge" into an acronym, E.D.G.E: Effusively Dotted Golden Elephant. I didn't feel like being too literal with the word "edge", and thought this opened up some more fun words to play with. The string on his trunk is just a little joke about how elephants are supposed to have amazing memories, so they shouldn't need physical reminders like bows tied to fingers (or in this case, trunks).

The elephant, as well as the type, were drawn in ink and colored digitally. I'll try to post some of the other artists' solutions when I get the final book..

Aquafina - Kelly Award

I found out recently that the Aquafina ads I worked on for BBDO a while back received a Kelly Award for best Insert/Outsert. I'll admit, I had never heard of the Kelly Awards before.. but it's still pretty cool. You can take a look at the award page here: http://www.kellyawardsgallery.org/index.html#/Gallery/Winners/Aquafina/ If you click on 'Judges Comments' you can hear them talk a little about why they picked it.

There's a good chance you didn't see the actual insert out in mags (but possibly the regular print ad..). It was actually pretty cool. The single Aquafina bottle on the front of the insert was printed on "seed paper" and then glued down onto the ads. The paper literally had seeds embedded in it, so you could actually pull it off and grow a plant and/or flowers out of it. Hence, their headline of "Water Brings Things to Life".

The bottles and all of the type were hand-drawn with pen and colored with watercolor. I guess I figured a water-based color solution was the most relevant, given the subject matter. Ok, now I'm thirsty... bye