Createathon on Campus

Last week I participated in the school of Mass Comm.'s Createathon on Campus. This is something that has been happening in the professional arena for 10 years now and this was the first one on a school campus. Design firms would rally local non-profits with little to no marketing budget and for 24 hours would do pro-bono work for them. It was rough at times, but it was really cool too to see a bunch of people rally together and use the gifts and talents we have to help the non-profit companies help other people. It was a awesome feeling to know that I was helping to impact dozens of lives, maybe even more.

My group was working for Jackson-Feild Homes, which is an organization that helps neglected and abused girls in the Foster care system. These girl's stories are incredible! One girl never got a birthday present until she was in the program at 16. Another had her second kid at 17, and her mother didn't even go to the hospital in Petersburg to see her, even though the mother lives in Richmond, because she didn't feel like riding the bus! WHAT?!?! But despite their previous lives, and because of the work of the staff Jackson Feild Homes, these girls are incredible strong in character and are getting the tools and skills they need to make the choices that can break them out of this cycle.

Our assignment was to make for them a promotional video, which was made difficult because we weren't allowed to video tape or record the girls. So we created videos of other volunteers reading scripts from these girls' lives. We focused on their hands to address a more creative presentation and also to keep that idea of anonymity. We started at 9 am and finished all our work at 3:30 am the next morning, having completed not just one video but 5 different video clips and suggestions for their homepage.
I designed this homepage and also a suggestion for a mini page that could host blogs from the girls. The donors have been very active in Jackson-Feild and also the lives of these girls and we thought a blog would be another way that the donors could participate, keep in touch, and also see the effectiveness of their donations. I don't know if the videos are online yet, we suggested that they put them on Youtube, but I don't know if that's happened yet.

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For more information about Jackson-Feild Homes check out;
http://www.jacksonfeild.org/

new logo, new look

hey ya'll, well I had a pretty cruddy day yesterday, I tried all day, but I got nothing accomplished all day. So I thought I could at least make a post to have something to show for the day, go figure that the site was having issues and I couldn't post anything. But today is a new day, so this might work now.

This is my new logo. it hasn't been officially approved for my senior studio, but I've already been signing pieces with it, so it's fairly official.

I figured there was no better time to start trying to get my name out there, then when entering a contest, so I put the signature logos on all four of the pieces I entered into the student exhibition for this spring. I really want to get in, especially now when I'm trying to look for a job, it would be a great encouragement and validating experience to be selected for the show. The competitions really tough, we have a lot of very talent people in COAR, but I think I have a fighting chance.

You may be familiar with my entries, I submitted a photo of the portrait of my dad (yeah, a photo of a painting, that might not fly, but it still looks nice, especially if you don't know that it's a photo of a painting.), the senior project "Cheaper than Dentures" and also "Prepare for Battle..." I also quickly finished the corrections I was going to make to the third piece "This sucks."

I didn't make all of the changes suggested in class, but I did change some of the things that I thought were major problems. The text reads "cleanliness is next to godliness but chores are for suckers."

When prepping for the submissions, I was short on time (I learned about it that morning) so I tried the best I could.

we'll see how this goes.

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