Making Friends and Awkward Advances

• Thou shalt not set your Facebook picture to anything but a photo of you.
• Thou shalt not do #followfridays unless it’s REALLY worth it. You look attention-starved and a little sad.
• Thou shalt not use DeviantArt.
• Thou shalt not send links of xckd comics to your science/math friends. Chances are, they’ve already seen it and understand it way better than you do.
• NO .GIFs ON FACEBOOK.
• Thou shalt not post Instagram photos that you took with the front-facing camera. The photos are already grainy enough without adding a Kelvin filter.
• Related: never use the Kelvin filter.
• If thine email takes more than 10 minutes to write, no one will read all of it. The most you can hope for is a skim filled with ennui.
• Thou shalt not ever post statuses/instagrams/tweets about food, weather, or whining.

It’s my portfolio. Hope you enjoy it.

cargocollective.com/austinpowe

The challenge with making a résumé is setting the right tone.

You want to be noticed for the work you’ve done and the projects you’ve spent your precious time on. The problem is, you need to do it in a clever and simple way. When I was brainstorming for different ways to make my résumé creative and functional, I used Bootstrap’s list as a way to find what I liked. I must admit, some of them are pretty awful. But a few of them are just what I wanted, so I found inspiration there.

I’ve been warned that after you make a “creative” résumé for the idea industry, it’s really hard to not keep fiddling with it. I’ve already got a lot of inspiration with how to improve mine. I’d really like to integrate some patterns and textures into it, although that might not happen for another term or so.

I noticed over and over again that people use an rating system to convey their mastery of different skills. This is worse than useless, it’s misleading.

Tone is everything. With mine, I aimed for a tone of casual creative professionalism, although I could definitely tell from some other résumés that they can really run the gamut. Next time I sit down to draft a new version, that will be my first priority: Set the tone and let it echo through every design decision.

File under: lessons learned.

My favorite advertising campaign of all time is 72andSunny’s “The World is Just Awesome” for The Discovery Channel. Here’s the TV spot:

The whole campaign works because it thrives on the feeling of “Wow, there are so many cool things out there,” a feeling that for most people, is largely connected to nostalgia. The last time we felt these feelings, we were probably in grade school science class learning that the tectonic plates that make up the earth’s surface are actually only sitting on A MOLTEN MAGMA CORE. What the hell? Seriously, the world is just awesome.

The print ads are pretty awe-inspiring, too.

There’s even been an xkcd webcomic about the advertisement. The webcomic largely depends on science-related jokes, so obviously the sentiment of the campaign resonated with the author.

72andSunny tapped into an emotion that isn’t easily defined and not often accessed by most advertisements. That’s why it resonates so strongly with audiences. It doesn’t hurt how relentlessly upbeat the message is—knowing that polar bears can run at 25 miles an hour and jump over 6 feet in the air makes me happy that they exist.

Mrs. Hendricks, my seventh-grade language arts teacher and lover of all things Ancient Roman, once took a red marker and crossed out every single cliché that I’d written in a single essay. When she handed the paper back to me across her desk that was littered with postcards of the Colosseum, the red-streaked paper was reduced to a few remaining original sentences. I was embarrassed, humbled. I vowed to never write another clichéd metaphor or hackneyed idea again.

That problem becomes more and more relevant the further I go in my education. I want my work to stand out and I need these projects to read as fresh and engaging. Whenever I write something or brainstorm an idea, I mentally mark up my paper like Mrs. Hendricks would have. Sometimes this works.

Recently I discovered tvtropes.org. This is a wiki dedicated to the tropes that are written into film, literature, video games, television, theatre, comic books, and even real life. It’s astounding how many different articles and clichés exist in the media world. (Some of my favorites: Are You Pondering What I’m Pondering?, Shaggy Dog Story, All Guys Want Sorority Women, Aesop Amnesia…) Just look at the page for Glee, one of TV’s biggest shows right now. There are tons of tropes repeated over and over again.

Is this okay? Part of me wants to argue that audiences rely on tropes to understand media more quickly. With attentions that are continually being drawn away from the television screen by phones and laptops, people need to have some sort of frame of reference to “get” the show quickly. (For example, you know that Glee operates under Freaky Is Cool, which tells the viewer a lot about the expected storylines/characters.)

However, the part of me that still marks up anything I write with huge red slashes knows that these tropes are boring and can be overcome, with enough creativity and dedication to originality. Even if it means simply turning a cliché on its head, that’s at least more original than falling into a tired rut.

The delightful Erica shared the Sketchnote Army blog the other day and it really resonated with me. It’s a blog about people who make their notes visually pleasing in addition to informative, a marriage between form and function. Drawing is like a mnemonic device for many people—if they’re taking notes and also thinking about forming them into shapes and “designing” the notes, they’re more likely to remember the ideas they’re illustrating.

I like to illustrate my favorite quotes from lectures so that they stick with me longer, even if they don’t really have much to do with the material being covered.

My digital arts professor handed out little sticky note pads to the class one day in lecture because she wanted to drive this point home. We were instructed to take notes on the lecture but also to feel free to draw on the pad. It worked, and I found myself much more happy to sit through the three hour lecture because I was also engaging with the material on a tactile level.

Also, sometimes I just need to doodle during class. Sometimes when we have a guest speaker in a class, I try to make some sort of visual representation of the person so it’s easier to connect the notes with a face and a specific event. This is not the case with this doodle, but the sketch in the middle of the notes on the right was one of the examples of good magazine layout design that we discussed in class. I wanted to remember it, so I made a thumbnail of it.

Creating little sketches makes focusing easier and remembering come naturally. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

Advertising can be at its most effective when it can pervade into the audience’s life. The message is much more clear when people can touch, smell, or taste the message that’s being sent.

The UO Cinema Studies program knows this, and launched an excellent bit of marketing for their “Film on Film” series that happened earlier this week. Sitting in strategic locations around campus are little baskets of candy, branded with the Film on Film logo and information about the program.

First side: “Film on Film” logo. Reverse: Dates/times/movies that are being shown through the program, as well as the website for the Cinema Studies program. The candy was crunchy and hard, like the inside of a Spree.

It should also be noted what an excellent presence the Cinema Studies program has on the internet. Not only does it maintain a very useful website, but it also manages a facebook page, tumblr, and active twitter. (Although whoever approved that color scheme for the tumblr needs to be fired, immediately.)

The Cinema Studies program is an excellent example of an entity becoming a brand and benefiting from it. There is a distinct tone and style to these online presences and tactile marketing tools that entice the reader to participate. I know that while I’m not a cinema studies major, I have attended a CS events that I’ve found out about via these online presences.

Oh, and I got some candy out of it. Yeee

Rachel Hom, UO alum and current 72andSunny Jr. Strategist, proposed a question to the students in my #UOcreativeStrat class:

“What new behavioral trends are happening at the University of Oregon? In what groups of people, and how/where do you see the pattern? And how can you prove this is happening? Bring evidence.”

At University of Oregon, we’re open-minded. We don’t care if you’re a lady and haven’t shaved your legs in a few months. We won’t judge if you’re taking BA101 for the second or third time.

But eating Doughco at 11:30 am on a Tuesday? You’d better keep that lunch secret to yourself.

The behavioral trends at UO extend to purchasing power. 13th Street between Kincaid and Hillyard is commonly called “campus downtown,” and it is a flurry of activity on any day of the week, even late at night. The number of student-oriented shops there create a subcultures within the UO community. Here’s a breakdown of two examples:

Coffee:
Everyone knows what the three different cup styles are, and what they say about the person holding them. There’s the Roma coffee cups that mean that you are vaguely concerned with supporting a local shop and you are also probably a hipster. Common also are the ubiquitous white Starbucks cups that mean that you need a fancy blended drink with WiFi access and fast. You’re probably either (a) in a sorority, (b) a coffee elitist, or (c) a twitter addict. However, the worst coffee cup on 13th is the dreaded Duck Store coffee cups. These normally only are seen in the middle of the week, during $1 Coffee Wednesdays. This just means you are a cheap bastard and probably don’t care if your coffee tastes like swill.

Italian food:
Matt Bronstein said it best:

DoughCo, the calzone/cookie restaruant, doesn’t exactly have a great rap among upperclassmen. The restaurant is known for being good only for food that you consume while drunk/high. (Although freshmen also are known to soberly frequent the red benches.) However, going to Sy’s Pizza is considered the “mature” thing to do—go figure.

There are microcosms within the UO community, and they make themselves visible via the food they buy and the shops they frequent. When Starbucks first burst onto the coffee scene in large cities, customers were known to walk away from the stores while deliberately holding the paper cups so that the logo faced outward, as if to say, “Hey, look what I found. Superior coffee.” The same thing is happening within the UO social scene: Calzones are a status symbol. #ILoveMyDucks