No sleep till Brooklyn

Monday night my pal Greg and I took a field trip to Brooklyn--DUMBO, to be exact (and no, we didn't stop at West Elm)--to see a panel of top designers make presentations and pitches as they would to their clients. The lineup was as follows:

Jonathan Alger, C+G Partners: pitching Yankee Stadium graphics (which they won the job, btw)

Debbie Millman, Sterling Brands: Tropicana redesign

Jessie Arrington, Workshop; and Liz Danzico, SVA: Charter for Compassion

Michael Bierut, Pentagram: Museum of Arts and Design

First of all, the cool factor was way high; DUMBO, the fancy bar/performance space, me, Greg (oh come on, we upped that cool factor by quite a bit), Debbie Millman, Michael Bierut... The place was going to burst with awesomeness.

Second? The presentations were awesome. Jonathan Alger was very charming and funny explaining his pitch to "Mr. Jeter" while making funny asides about his (not Jeter's) lack of baseball stadium knowledge. Debbie Millman addressed the Tropicana "elephant in the room" and went through a a bunch of back and forths and market research (note: the orange juice in a glass concept tested very, very poorly). Jessie and Liz had an incredibly detailed presentation about the Charter for Compassion (including a very awesome logo), and Michael Bierut just killed it with his logo process for the Museum of Arts and Design.

All in all, it was a great time. It was pretty amazing to watch the presenters actually present their work as if they were pitching the actual clients. So cool... definitely glad we went.

Speaking of posters...

My pal Amy from Elements emailed me this morning with a link to her latest blog entry, citing AIGA's Get Out the Vote; an invitation "to create nonpartisan posters—and YouTube submissions—that inspire the American public to participate in the electoral process and vote for a presidential candidate in the 2008 general election."

You can see some of the posters here, but there's a 6-odd minute slideshow of about 50 posters that is amazing. While the designs are diverse, the message is the same: get your butt out there and vote on November 4th!