FullBleed

The unveiling of the new Art Directors Club logo has the design blogs abuzz…with mostly negative comments. “Uninspired,” “generic,” and “dated,” are just a few of the pejoratives being tossed around. (I know what you’re thinking: “Hey, didn’t ADCMW just re-do its logo several years ago? Can’t you guys make up your minds?”)

Wait a second! The club in question is the Art Directors Club in New York City (or ADC Global as they sometimes call themselves). The problem is, many people are confused by the similarity in the names, especially if they didn’t even know that there was an Art Directors Club in New York. In fact, during my time as ADCMW president, I would occasionally refer to the club in New York as “ADC National,” incurring dirty looks from the ADCMW Director — who happens to be my wife. She was right and I should have known better. Unlike the AIGA — a national organization with chapters around the country — the various art directors clubs from Denver to Connecticut to Northwestern Arkansas are not related to one another apart from the shared name. I can’t speak for the other ADCs around the country, but ADCMW is fiercely independent and proud to be going it alone.
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I’ve been wanting to go to HOW since I found out HOW existed.

I think it was the first time I saw Paula Scher speak at Syracuse University in 1999, and she went on about Pentagram and painting her crazy maps… Or it was when the Communications Design Head, Ken Hine, introduced me and my sophomore class to Tibor Kalman, The Eameses, Buckminster Fuller, and all of the other amazing creatives who have done their part to shape our industry and inspire my career…

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Photo courtesy Sean McCormick

Russell Heimlich is a lefty. And an only child. And he knows a thing or two about computers.

“My parents really wanted me to be good at computers, so there has been a computer in our house for as long as I can remember. My first computer was a Commodore 64; my parents wrote DOS commands so I could play games,” he said. “As we upgraded computers I learned more and more about them. My dad worked for the government, and he once took me in so I could use Gopher, a pre-Internet computer network.”

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In Part I of Marketing for Designers, ADCMW’s own long-time member Deane Nettles shares how he has learned to leverage the web as a foundation toward promoting his creative work. Stay tuned for Part II, which will include his recommendations on how he has used social media tools to build upon his website and email marketing efforts.

Let’s presume that there is an inside world and an outside world. The inside world is your studio where you live, and the outside world is where your clients live. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’ve built up a client base. Those clients recommend you to other people, and there is this buzz in the outside world … which provides you with new business.

But, to build buzz in the online world, where do you even start? Here’s the answer: with a website.

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