Art Director Antics

Sigh.

There’s 16 days total left out of my 3 year program. I’m feeling all emotional haha. A bunch of students from my program who won at the CMA Gala this year just sat in on a little Board of Governors meeting at our school. The whole time I was just thinking about how far we’ve come.

I sucked so bad in first year. I mean I was seriously awful. To be able to say that I’m interning at Crispin Porter+Bogusky in two weeks just blows my mind. CP+B was always that sparkly, fun agency that we always heard about and knew of for their super cool ideas and I feel so lucky and proud that I get to have my start there.

I couldn’t have got this far without my main professor Jef. I can’t even count how many times he’s gone out of his way to help me succeed. He’s an excellent teacher who I could even say that I see as a friend. I owe a great deal to him.

I won’t bore you with all the sentimental details but I urge anyone who is thinking of studying advertising to come to Mohawk. I actually feel cared about here. All the teachers know my name and want to see me succeed. It’s a nice feeling, one that I’m sad to be moving on from.

Red Urban

“We are equal parts strategy and craft. We exist to build ideas and content that spread into the lives and hearts of our audience. And we have a blast doing it.”

Above is the description that can be found under the ‘Agency’ tab of the Red Urban website.

equal parts strategy and craft

This phrase in particular really resonates with me. I get pretty perturbed at people who walk around calling themselves Art Directors when their work isn’t artful at all. Red Urban has it bang on. You should never sacrifice sweating out the nitty gritty design details for any reason, be it time constraints, lack of inspiration or any other factor that may hinder the look and feel of your work. How can a piece or a concept ‘spread into the lives and hearts of the audience’ if it is not beautiful, hideously ugly or both? This applies to audio rich methods of communication too. How things are crafted matters and obviously Red Urban agrees.

Enough of my griping and more about why Red Urban seems pretty awesome.

The Clients

Red Urban has a cool roster of clients that range from big time names like VW.ca to small, single location stores like the Drake General Store. I find this to be an attractive quality in an agency. Small clients with big dreams means potential for super cool and quirky ideas accompanied by neato visuals where as big clients offer up bigger budgets, extending possibilities and the chance for international exposure.

The Work

After parousing through their featured work you just get the feeling that the clever creatives over at RU have some seriously fun times coming up with these ideas. When you get that feeling simply by looking at some online work it’s got to have some merit behind it.

Aside from that, everything looks KILLER. It all has this young, trendy feel to it without sacrificing each campaigns desired message. It’s ads you actually don’t mind looking at. You don’t feel like they’re shoving the product down your throat but rather presenting it to you all cool and edgy like (insert cool guy msn emoticon here).

I like that a lot of their work includes short videos (not sure if they’re commercials or viral videos), most of which are pretty funny. For examples the videos created for Drake General Store are hillarious.(http://www.redurban.ca/detailed-drake-general-store.php) I encourage you to check them out if you have the time.

The Overall

From the witty descriptions for each of the campaigns to the understated design of their site Red Urban just seems super cool. The importance they place on craft definitely shows and works with their concepts to create really good looking final pieces.