Yesterday, I went to work at the coffee shop down the street. I bought my regular coffee, loaded it with a ton of sugar because I can’t drink coffee unless it tastes like candy and took my seat. After carefully arranging my things on my tiny table, I plugged in my headphones and pressed play.

…Silence…

…I pressed play again…

…More silence…

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For the first time ever – in my entire career in Internetting – I clicked on an ad. And it wasn’t just an accidental click. It was a real click. I wanted to know more.

First, a little context…

I was going to be productive today. I have a nice little list of things to do sitting to my right and I’ve already checked off the first two things. Then, as it usually goes, I check the Tweet Machine to see what’s new. We’ve been trying to be much more active within the Twitter community, so I take a 5 minute break every hour to see what people are saying and if there’s anything I think other people should see. During this last break, I saw an article posted by Core77 that talked about the influence of good design in schools and how it can improve their function or something. Sounded interesting, but I haven’t read it yet because the page loaded and I saw this – [Read more...]

I’m Jessie, the Business Coordinator for Polymathic. Unlike my fellow badasses, I have not dabbled in web designing or developing. Unless you count poorly PhotoShopping my face onto sweet album covers.

Instead, my expertise lies in communicating. You never have to ask ME to pass the salt at the dinner table because, I can read you. LIKE A BOOK.

I started communicating when I was two. It was from that day on that I decided I wanted to talk forever. Actually, no. It was when I was 11 years old and discovered Conan O’Brien. Initially, I was terrified, but eventually I was idolizing him. He taught me the true meaning of writing’s Big Three: persuading, informing and entertaining. So, I went to school for it. [Read more...]

It was the first day of my fifth quarter at Miami Ad School, I was studying at Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Boulder, Colorado and needless to say, I was a little excited. My classmates and I were all nerding out and imagining what it would be like to work at CP+B. We had no idea who our teacher was, just that he was one of the creative directors. With our best work in hand, we had visions of this unknown teacher looking at our first campaign, stopping us right there and offering us a job.

He walked into the room and broke our wild imaginations saying something to the effect of, “I don’t give a damn what you have in your portfolios. What else do you do?”

And there it was. What else do you do? Do you play music in a band? Are you writing a book? Do you design furniture? Are you recreating the first level of Super Mario in fruit? He didn’t care about what we did in the advertising world. He wanted to know what we did outside of it.

As creatives, we’re constantly seeing new, amazing ideas from every corner of the creative spectrum. It’s inspiring, humbling and frustrating (read – why didn’t I think of that?!?) But most importantly, it proves that there’s no reason why we can’t be the ones being retweeted a thousand times. Our teacher wanted us to know this. If it’s a good idea, it’s a good idea. People will encourage you. People will want to help you. But it’s only up to you to get the ball rolling. [Read more...]