Creative vision can be a powerful tool in the business world; on our visit to Grey Matter Group, we had the chance to see it in action.  GMG has done fantastic creative work, it’s been the soul of what drives the company. Rick Devon, the creative partner and founder of Grey Matter, played the role of guest adviser for the week. Without Rick’s creative vision, there would definitely be less award winning creative work in West Michigan. Check out GMG’s site: here.

A familiar friend stopped by for the nightly topic: keeping creative simple. It’s not the first time our group has heard this before, and there’s a reason. Simple, yet clever creative, wins Addy’s. Consumers are seeing more and more ads, let alone communicated messages. It adds up to there being too many choices and not enough time or brain power to choose.

Perhaps the best advice that Rick gave our group: “play to your strengths”. If you’re a better writer: write. If you’re a better creative: make logo’s. Young Creatives need to know where they want to fit in an ad agency.

The question becomes: do you know where you want to be? If yes, does your portfolio reflect that?

Here’s some photo’s from GMG. Possibly more to come soon also. Don’t forget Feb 23rd there’s a chance to see some of the largest ad agencies in West Michigan with the Creative Crawl. Get the full scoop on the Facebook Page here. It’s the only place you’ll see the creative from Julia and Shelly that was deemed unfit for publication. Controversy’s in. Go be a fan on Facebook!

Lastly, a group shot from the night!

Post contributed by: Andrew Rushmore

It’s been a busy few weeks for this session of the Polishing Center; this week we wrapped up the creative for the Ad Fairs: Creative Crawl, tackled more concepts for the GR Hopper and had a Saturday morning meeting with a new client. We’re proud to start working on both branding work for Soundpost as well as a project with CP+B out of Boulder, CO.

Geoff Shirley, the creative director at the Highland group gave great insight into concepting and logo design as well as choosing the final campaign.

Take a look at some of the insight we’ve gotten for logo design:

• Ditch the computer, start with a sketchpad and produce concept after concept: this lets you free yourself from the bounds of editing and over thinking.
• Look for inspiration online, Google terms for sites and images that will help you find inspiration. Don’t stop there though, get out and look for things that may inspire you.
• You’re making more than a logo; you’re making a ‘route to a brand’s identity’.
• Creatives should look at whether the logo concept can translate to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube as well as the traditional tests such as ‘the copy test’.

(The copy test refers to gray-scaling an image to make sure it can be photocopied and maintain the same message)

Julia Roser and Shelley Migliore produced the final concept that is moving to production, congratulations Shelly and Julia! Take a look at their work below.

Thanks to Green Frog Photography and Jeff Hage for photography -(Click for the larger image) You’ll be seeing the billboard versions courtesy of Lamar Digital soon.

More updates to come; the next session is held at Hannon McKendry, with the gracious host Bill McKendry!

Post contributed by: Andrew Rushmore