2.22.12

Our first mock-ups of our ads were due today. My partner and I were able to create two pretty strong ads for Blue Moon beer, but we had some difficulty figuring out an idea for the last ad in our series. We wanted to use the image of a woman's leg with the bottom of a beer glass, but nothing was working very well. Some of our classmates were great and gave us valuable feedback, but we still had trouble communicating the idea.

For the rest of the class, we basically went around and critiqued each others work. Jimmy was able to spend an adequate amount of time on everyone's projects this time around so it was a productive day. We're now going to take the feedback we received and work together to improve our ads for next class.

2.20.12

Class started with a discussion about Kali Nikitas. Our professor constantly urges us to speak up and hold discussions ourselves instead of him asking us questions about it; he would rather us communicate in a forum format rather than hold our hands through the discussion. A few people, including myself, were more than willing to pose questions to our classmates to essentially get the ball rolling, but as usual...most of our classmates are a bit on the shy side and strayed from discussing how they felt about Kali.

We then went over our group sketches. We had to have 40 revised sketches by today to present to Jimmy. My partner and I had worked diligently on our sketches at a local Starbucks and were pleased with the sketches we had worked on. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get as much feedback as we would have liked because the class ended and Jimmy still hadn't seen 3 groups. Every class we seem to try to allot and appropriate the time evenly between all the groups, but we always seem to fall short. We were able to get some feedback from Jimmy after class and it was really helpful. I just wish it could have been during class time.

2.15.2012

Our assignment was to have 40 sketches ready to go for Jimmy to look at. My partner and I were not able to meet with each other to work on the sketches together like we were supposed to, but we still came up with the 40. I don't think it was so wrong of us to work separately on the initial sketches because we both have valid ideas and concepts to present. I understand Jimmy's point of view in that we should have formulated the sketches together, but I felt that we would have more had we worked separately.

2.13.2012

Today, we sat around our square table and discussed our new ideas for our advertising campaign. My partner and I have decided to improve the advertising of Blue Moon beer which is a product of Molson Coors. Although Blue Moon is not one of the more well known beer brands, it still holds up as being one of Molson Coors better products. The Blue Moon campaign, as it stands, focuses more on the "artfully crafted" tagline, but it falls short of reaching its full potential in expanding to different groups of people. We have decided to take on the challenge and help expand the Blue Moon demographic to women, specifically women between the ages of 21-35 and women non-beer drinkers. It is a very specific demographic that we are trying to reach, but with our strategy, we should be able to successfully reach that demographic.

2.8.2012

Presentations were today and everyone did a great job! Everyone put so much energy and effort into their presentations and ads that it was a good day.

2.6.2012

First presentations are today. A lot of time and energy went into these ads...let's hope for the best! I'm looking forward to getting lots of constructive criticism.

2.1.2012

Today was the day of our first real critique from Jimmy. We were all asked to post our ads up on the wall and we took a good 20-30 minutes to read through everyone's work. There were some really great ideas up there, but collectively, we still need a lot of work in our illustrator/photoshop abilities.

For my partner and I, in particular, Jimmy told us that we need to work on rendering our imagery better for the con ad and to focus on coming up with better copy for our pro ad. I'm pleased to say that we have been working diligently on improving our ads and look forward to presenting everyone with our final pieces come Monday.

1.30.2012

Our second round of sketches was due today and we now have four options for us to develop further! My partner and I were pleased that Jimmy had given us the go ahead to move forward with our project. We had two options for the con side and two options for the pro side. By Wednesday, Jimmy would like to see two fully rendered/developed and to scale ads so that our classmates can concisely see what our topic is and the message we are trying to communicate. It's a lot to accomplish in a day, but I'm confident we can deliver. We'll see how it goes.