More ads

Here are a few more ads I did for my advertising classes. The first one, "Amped", was for Strat Design & Visuals. We were given a product and told to produce an ad for it. The second series for d-Con were for Strat Writing. The AMP ad is intended to be a two-page spread, so it's reproduced smaller here, but it was designed actually to be twice the size of the others.

The AMP ad has copy. Here's what it says: "The power surge of an energy drink with that extra kick only Mountain Dew can give you. That's the edge that puts AMP in its own league--and what puts you in yours. It's fuel to be you. The (logo: Mountain Dew) of energy drinks"

I have a few more from both classes that I need to put up, but I don't have them with me at the moment.

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Hi Rebecca!

Exhausted

As I type this today, all I want to do is go to sleep .. but I can't. I have to stay awake enough to go home, change, go to the gym, come back, shower and get back to work on ad comps that are due tomorrow. That's the downside of being a grad student. You don't have much control over your life. Actually, one doubts whether it even exisits for real.

But there is a good side. Yes, you see, as a grad student, you are expected to produce your top-quality product. Your A-game. Your full monty, as it were. And to produce your top-quality A-game product you must have top-quality tools to produce with. That's where gadgetry comes in. I have so much work to do over the next few months .. but the good side is that I can spend, guilt-free, on the proper tools with which to create works of unrivaled brilliance. I will share some of these tools with you now.

Olympus voice recorder/flash drive. Now this is fast-becoming one of my most prized gadgets. Behold! A voice recorder that goes straight to digital saving the files in that pesky WMA format (for which I have a little utility which quickly converts them to MP3) which you can just plug into the computer's USB port and copy the files straight off! It works fantastic and the audio quality is very good. It runs off one AAA battery and can not only store over 8 hours of fairly decent-quality audio, but it can even play MP3s as well!! This thing saved my bacon last night when I needed to copy something from the 15" to the 12" in a hurry and I didn't have my jump drive with me--I'd left it in my desk at work. When I remembered that this little baby *is* a 256MB jump drive, it was like the clouds had parted and a single sunbeam from the heavens appeared .. and unlike that awful clunky Magnavox monster I got at WalMart last year, this little baby actually works.

Canon PIXMA i6000D. You can't believe the difference the right paper makes when generating full color proofs to present in class. Wow. I bought this little printer and a box of photo paper, and it is a staggering difference. Now I can color print to my heart's content, I don't have to use the office laser printer and feel guilty, and I can use this awesome photo paper and generate comps that look just dazzling. Zesty, one might even say. Of course, replacement ink costs about seventy bucks. Ouch. But hey, it's the cost of being a grad student, isn't it.

Jabra Bluetooth headset. I have a lot of long-distance calls to make in the coming weeks .. I have some art directors to woo and appointments to schedule. Since, sadly, the earpiece/mic that came with my Samsung phone bit the dust a few weeks ago, I figured it was time for a Bluetooth wireless device. I bought this last night from this cute girl named Michelle at the Sprint Store near where I live. She could have probably talked me into buying the Jabra wireless "Bucket o' Dirt" accessory for another seventy five bucks, but she actually gave me a discount on the device as it had been erroneously misquoted to me as being $79.99 or something, when the actual retail price was over a hundred dollars. I have not tested this unit out yet, but I expect it will serve my purpose very well.

It is now 5:30 and the gym awaits. I am in a celebratory mood .. the assignments which have plagued me for the past week and a half have finally been completed and turned in, my midterm exam has been taken (I am fairly confident I earned an A, but probably not a perfect A) and I feel like a big load is off my shoulders for the time being. I still have comps to do for tomorrow, but I already have almost all the artwork for them ready to go and doing the actual layouts will be a lot more fun than the ones I did for the dog food ads (which will be posted here soon).

I'm out!

25786.

When I was little, I had this cardboard mailbox toy. I don’t remember why I had it. Someone probably gave it to me for my birthday or something. It looked like a mailbox you see in front of a house on a country lane, the kind with the little red flag you push up to signify mail is inside.

I kept my mailbox on my bookshelf next to my Polly Pockets collection. I don’t quite remember when or why it started, but one morning the little red flag was pushed up. Surprised, I peeked inside and found a note addressed to me. It read simply, “I Love You.” What an unexpected treat! I remember jumping up and down in front of my parents, telling them about my discovery,

And from there on out, on most every morning for years, I’d wake up and see the red flag standing at attention. Sometimes it was a note saying. “I believe in you.” Other times it might be a funny picture cut out of a magazine. Or a Hershey’s chocolate kiss. Or a book. Or a drawing of a funny face. On and on. Day after day. Treat after treat. You can’t believe how happy this made me. I felt so special knowing someone took the time out to make this magic happen. This was and is the strongest memory from my childhood.

Funny though, nothing was ever signed. Everything I received was from some anonymous source. And really, it was every day -- except when my father went away on a business trip. Then the mail would stop....

You know something silly, when I go out to my mailbox each day, there are bills and junkmail and what-not. But secretly, I’m half hoping to find a little note maybe hiding at the back...

God I miss him so much. He was the single greatest person I have ever known.

I wonder if they have mailboxes in heaven.

26052.

I send many emails throughout the day. And embarrassingly enough, especially for a university grad, my spelling is plain awful. So I began to keep track of my worst offenses, the words I always spell wrong:

apparantly
thier
wierd
seperate
benifit
independance
embarassed
boundry
algorhythm
fourty
Nietche
inadequite
abundence
congradulations
permanantly

(I spelled them wrong here on purpose so you could see what I mean.)

Thinking myself clever, I printed them out (correctly) and pasted them on the side of my computer as a reference. But inevitably people would ask what the words were for. I certainly didn't want to explain my spelling shortcomings.

So I took down the list and replaced it with:

Apparently, a weird benefit to separate yet independent boundaries: Their inadequate algorithm offers an abundance of congratulations which permanently embarrass.
-Nietzsche, age forty

Now I have my reference words and nobody bothers to ask. They think it is merely some weird existential quote.

www.cavecanum.com