Command X: Season 2 is a graphic design reality show featuring seven up-and-coming designers who step into the spotlight and have the chance to break into the industry in front of 2,000 peers, heroes and potential employers during "Make/Think" the 2009 AIGA Design Conference. Throughout the conference, contestants will take on a series of design challenges to complete and present on the main stage within 24 hours. Although no one from the Charlotte advertising or design community was featured in Season 1, a designer from a North Carolina ad agency in Raleigh did compete and was a runner up. Way to go, Matt!
This year, seven lucky participants will show off their talent before the world's best designers. Each will receive a complimentary registration to the conference—although they’ll be hard at work on their next design challenge most of the time! The winner of “Command X: Season 2” will receive $1,000, design software and iPhone and best of all Glory.
At least one of us, anyway. As president of the Charlotte chapter of AIGA, the professional association for design, I’m excited to visit über-hip Portland and learn what designers from across the nation have been working on within their own local Chapters. The retreat is an opportunity for the organization’s leaders to meet together, compare notes, and discuss the future. This year’s leadership retreat is particularly important, as we will be discussing the findings from a six-month process of ascertaining what board members, chapter leaders and members believe is the appropriate course for AIGA as we approach the organization’s centennial in 2014.
Called “Sea Change,” the 2009 retreat will be held June 4–6 in downtown Portland, Oregon. I will be one of five members representing the
Charlotte graphic design community. There will also be some folks from Raleigh advertising agencies there representing our neighboring Raleigh Chapter. I’ll take plenty of pictures, sample the craftmade beers for which Portland is famous, and be sure to report back on what trends are developing for AIGA and the future of brand and identity design.
The South Carolina Lowcountry is a region rich in charm, flavors, and natural beauty. When Raleigh based Landquest Development approached birdsong gregory about helping them create an engaging online presence, we knew the design and functionality of the site would need to capture the essence of life at Harbor Club on Winyah Bay. To promote this charming bayside master-planned community, we designed a sophisticated, informative online experience that delivers unexpected insights into the local area via a series of Flash animations and colorful facts about local flora and fauna.
To learn more about the online and offline branding, marketing, and advertising services our agency offers, please visit the
birdsong gregory website, contact Jim Cusson at 704-332-2299, or stop by the next time you’re in downtown Charlotte.
Today, it’s not enough to have a well-designed website or a secure e-commerce presence. You need people to actually go there and interact with your online brand. And if you are a member of the branding Charlotte or marketing Charlotte, NC communities, you know you have to pay to play.
Pay per click search engine marketing is a form of online advertising where the advertiser pays to be listed in the sponsored link section of the search engines. When you launch a PPC advertising campaign, you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. Of course PPC ads, also called sponsored links, are related to the searches made by the users. You have to buy keywords using an auction feature that determines the Cost Per Click (CPC) of a given keyword, this bid also has an influence on your position among the other ads on the page.
You then set a maximum budget for your campaign. That means that if you set a $500 budget for a $1 keyword your ad will virtually be printed on search pages until five hundred users have clicked your ad and landed on one of your website’s pages.
Charlotte, NC advertising agencies please take note: PPC advertising is one of the most effective marketing methods used on the Internet. According to some experts, online marketers will spend more than 5 billion dollars on PPC campaigns by 2010. Consequently the competition for keywords is likely to get tougher and tougher as time goes by, making the optimization of that process ever more necessary for North Carolina advertising agencies, from Charlotte to Raleigh.
A handful of folks from the Charlotte graphic design community, as well as those who are associated with marketing in Charlotte participated in a caravan to Raleigh to hear Chip Kidd speak at an event hosted by the Raleigh chapter of AIGA – the professional association for design.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Kidd grew up in the Reading suburb of Shillington, strongly influenced by American popular culture. While a design student at Penn State, an art instructor once gave the assignment to design a book cover for
Museums and Women by John Updike, who is also a Shillington native. The teacher panned Kidd’s work in front of the class, suggesting that book design would not be a good career choice for him.
Kidd is currently associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. He first joined the Knopf design team in 1986, when he was hired as a junior assistant.
Publishers Weekly described his book jackets as “creepy, striking, sly, smart, unpredictable covers that make readers appreciate books as objects of art as well as literature.”
USA Today also called him “the closest thing to a rock star” in graphic design today, while author James Ellroy has called him “the world’s greatest book-jacket designer.”
The Charlotte, NC branding and marketing guys and gals who braved I-85 for the drive to Raleigh didn’t return disappointed. Chip Kidd is very funny as a speaker, and he provided plenty of examples of inspired design work and anecdotes.
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