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  • Get your gear ready for SketchCamp Des Moines

    September 13th, 2012 / Comments (0)

    Hey there, artists/designers/programmers/all you Egotists: it's time to sign up for SketchCamp Des Moines.

    Amanda Morrow's monthly Design + Tech meetup held a mini SketchCamp earlier this year, and now the crew is putting on a full-grown event on October 20 at StartupCity.

    What is SketchCamp?

    Sketching is all about thinking visually, not about creating masterpieces in your notebook.

    Too often considered a privilege of the artistic, sketching can be a powerful tool for anyone and everyone. Designers, programmers, entrepreneurs, marketers, advertisers, and artists can all benefit from scribbling out their ideas. If you can write your name with a pen, pencil, or marker, you can sketch.

    SketchCamp is about empowering yourself and your colleagues to start sketching more as way of brainstorming and communicating with one another. No matter what your background or what you’re working on, sketching may be that missing tool you’ve needed to dig yourself out of that creative rut.

    Sounds like lots of workshops centering on improving the drawing skills and confidence of all. Who will be there?

  • Going big in Winfield Iowa

    August 28th, 2012 / Comments (1)

    To market Winfield's "Answer Plot Knowledge" events — which are held to equip farmers with the crop and seed info they need to make buying decisions — Minneapolis' Colle+McVoy tapped California-based mural artist John Cerney to turn a photo of an actual Winfield seller and farmer into two giant hand-painted works of art. These 22-foot pieces were placed alongside an accompanying billboard in a cornfield in Iowa. Over-sized wins every time.

    Via

  • Beeline & Blue has stock photo blues

    August 24th, 2012 / Comments (0)

    These two gents are from Beeline & Blue's website. The guy on the right's fine, but the guy on the left...is that thing even real?

  • New McDonald's Olympic spots starring Lolo Jones

    July 30th, 2012 / Comments (0)

    An unlikely guy, Brian, coaches up hurdler Lolo Jones. Because if Team USA wins gold, Jake could win prizes.

  • How creativity is bad for your ad team

    July 19th, 2012 / Comments (0)

    Drew McLellan, famed Iowa ad man and "top dog" of McLellan Marketing Group, says so in the BR:

    But does it serve our businesses and our business goals? On the surface, it’s easy to argue that creativity is essential to good advertising and marketing. Whether it’s strategic nuances and insights, being innovative in your brand and how you express it, or marketing materials that capture the audience’s attention and imagination – all of those are built on a foundation of creative thinking.

    But I’ve been in some situations recently where it was evident that the long-term objectives were not being well served by an infusion of creativity. So let’s look at how the very thing we work so hard to capture can also be a detriment.

    Nobody ever comments on the Business Record's articles, so you can just go ahead and discuss here: creativity -- always bad? Best in small doses? Or destined to run free across the plains?


  • Is Rent still relevant?

    July 17th, 2012 / Comments (0)

    The cast of RentThe cast of RentWe attended Rent, at the Des Moines Playhouse, recently -- and later had the conversation, "Is Rent over? Is it actually a classic, or destined to fade?"

    Writing for the Des Moines Register, Michael Morain weighed in (emphasis ours):

    "The story is darker than the Playhouse’s typical summer fare (“Hairspray,” “Grease,” “High School Musical” and its sequel). It’s a little jarring, in fact, to see the guy who played Edna Turnblad (Douglas Cochrane) now dealing heroin.

    But unlike a production of “Macbeth” several years ago at Iowa State, where it was hard to shake the feeling that the bloodthirsty Scots once belonged to a 4-H club, this cast makes us believe they’ve spent at least a little time on the mean streets of New York. Whether or not that’s true, it’s clear they’re believers themselves – not only in their roles but in the show’s message."

  • Indie magazine Ames Progressive reviews DSM artist's new album

    July 11th, 2012 / Comments (0)

    "Found Things is an album riddled with paradoxes. It’s a mellow work that sounds best when blasted out of huge speakers. It remains completely true to Davis’s musical roots (he’s in Macalester College’s choir and is being classically trained in music there), even though it was entirely recorded and mixed on a laptop. The track names suggest that Davis took a carefree approach to recording the album, but the sonic story that runs through the entire compilation is completely deliberate."

    Interest piqued? Read the rest of the review or stop by the record release party at the Space for Ames on Friday.

  • It's Drinking Time! - Iowa Craft Brew Festival

    June 15th, 2012 / Comments (0)

    Basemint did some solid work on these materials. There are still tickets available for the event tomorrow (June 16th). Sign up today if you support craft beer or shirts.

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