Breakfast at Tiffany's

Weekend stories of Montreal will be jotted down here as soon as I download the pictures, but I had something exciting to report meanwhile:  This morning I met our Head Of Production, Tech Director, Video Director, and Executive Producer at the Eataly Café near Madison Square Park.  We had our morning caffeine and heard horrifying live-octopus-on-a-plate stories from our HOP's trip to Korea, and then it was upstairs to the corporate offices of Tiffany's for our 10 AM meeting.  The meeting was to present designs for Tiffany's Fall Collection unveiling.  It'll be a 10 minute video similar to ones they've worked with iNDELIBLE to produce for the past few years, and this year, by some fluke, the design work all landed on me.  Tiffany's wanted "Fresh Eyes" on the project and a total re-imaging of how they could present the pieces with a nod to their 175th anniversary.  Since I was waiting to hear back on the Brit List, I was free.  And having no concept of my history, skills, or limitations, my new iNDELIBLE coworkers asked me last Wednesday if I could mock up some designs for the presentation.

Normally, if I had received direction from our Creative Director on something like this, I would have been a bit terrified of not translating onto the screen exactly what his vision was, and I'd have had two weeks to work on a single design.  With my new coworkers handing off the assignment, I was strangely calm and limitless in how I approached it (although they expected to see work by the end of the same day I first learned of the project, so that was definitely a new and much quicker timeline than I was used to).  Somehow, four designs flew together and they were narrowed down to three for revisions the next day.  With me fleeing to the Great White North last Friday, there wasn't an option for failure, and it really gave me the kick I needed to do some of my best and fastest work.  I was a bit shocked when various people from around our office started stopping by to tell me they'd heard the design boards were turning out amazingly, and today I got to see our clients react to the work as well as witness how our directors sell ideas, which was so exciting.  (Best part: when the Tiffany's people said that they really loved everything we put in front of them, and asked in all seriousness if they could afford it.  ahhh!)

These are the top secret looks;  right now they're leaning towards #1 or #2:

silent film-inspired, with archival photographs and deco flourishes

"Anthropological"; utilizing assets from Tiffany's old design books and botanical/scientific prints (like a scrapbook)

High Society - city scenes or old Tiffany's imagery overlaid with slick cutouts that play off jewelry silhouettes.

Another happy piece of news from today was that I found out my designs won the pitch for The Brit List!  Yay!!!!!!!  I'm ecstatic!  I'm not sure I'll get to work on animating them for broadcast if I'm tied up with Tiffany's, though I might try to weasel my way in because I'd really love to take a role in that.
Here's the winning design:

And this other design I did as well as two from Dave, our very talented and endlessly patient Senior Designer.  

a snippet of my other design (grunged-up Union Jack)

Dave's Design, #1 

Dave's design, #2

I figured while I was at it, I'd post some images of recent projects I've gotten to work on.  NASCAR was fun; I mocked up images for an idea in which slow-motion footage of the drivers would be composited over high-speed, energetic light-trails on trafficways.  It would have been really pretty stuff, but ESPN ultimately went for a revamp of last season's "Twisted Metal" look, and who can blame them?  My friend Kaydee designed that one and it's simply great.
**All of these images are screenshots I took out of a PDF preview; they're kinda low-res, ignore that.

My zoom-zoom look, which I'm still quite fond of...

Kaydee's look -- all heat and sparks and everything NASCAR fans are into. 

And here is the infamous NEWSDAY PowerPoint Presentation.  They hired us to design this deck for their potential advertisers and for general outreach.  I am somewhat mystified in admitting that I am now a mid-level expert at both PowerPoint, Keynote, and making stuff work on iPads.

The challenge with this was, how do you make PowerPoint Presentations less awful?  Well, you can't, really.  But if you try super hard, you might at least achieve more than just a blazée theme with words and pictures.  Here's how it ended up, pretty much (there were 52 pages, I'll spare you....):

And here are some of the original designs, because I think it's fun to look back at where everything started before the meddling begins!

Design #1

I'm lucky.  This is my JOB.