Nike Women Half-Marathon Runners / Me and the Mrs. in Seattle a week after
NLCS Game 4, the one where we killt it in the 9th / the fun N-train ride home
World Series Game 2, the one with the 9-0 shutout.
Reppin SF in Times Square / Majorminor + Lauren and Jun behind the lens.
An unexpected free, whiskey-induced, night at the Guggenheim
accompanied by my own soundtrack as I walked up the corkscrew.
Yup. It’s been 2 months and some change since I last blogged and while I would normally slap my hand for lagging hard on posting anything up other than a status update or a tweet—I can’t.
Not only has 2010 been an awesome year, but It’s been busy on all sides of the spectrum from living as fulfilled of a personal life while holding down the Majorminor and StubHub front.
I will describe the last two months like this: Vegas. Sunny San Francisco weekends. Tons (and tons) of work. Seattle. Lots (and lots!) of black and orange. At the Giants’ NLCS game. At the Giants World Series game. A weekend in Seattle with the Missus. Brand New Conference + 4 days in NY.
And unlike what the title of this entry suggests, here’s a cool little project I got to work on for StubHub—a supplementary video presentation for the president’s keynote address at the 10th Anniversary StubHub All Hands meeting/Celebration. It uses handrawn cutouts, hundreds and hundreds of photos and iMovie. Not bad for a kid who can’t draw and taught himself how to edit.
I used to tell people that my life was like an unsexy version of Mad Men. Even that was an overstatement beyond belief. Not only because Mad Men is ridiculous cool, but the only parallels between Mad Men and my life at my last job was the fact that I worked at a marketing and advertising agency. Many drinks were had, there were office romances/hookups (and I’m sure there were/are more beyond my knowledge), stylish good-looking people and those clients.
I started watching Mad Men just as I was leaving my last job. The furniture and the style, and the fact that I worked at an ad agency are what drew me into watching. Then I got hooked. This season (Season 4) is insanely addictive and well-written. It’s not so much about the style and furniture for me anymore (and the transition to Modernism doesn’t quite appeal to me so much). Now it’s all about the characters.
From a material standpoint, it especially appeals to me since I love mid-century furniture (long before Urban Outiftters started suiting their stores up with it) and I love the scene and time period in which Henri-Cartier Bresson was photographing.
Here’s some eye candy and a slideshow from when the actual Mad Men ruled Madison Avenue:
» When Mad Men Ruled (via Slate Magazine)
As summer winds down—or perhaps San Francisco has another leg in that short stint we called “Indian Summer,” I wanted to share a few snapshots taken throughout the summer. It was a great one.
My recap:
Rob moved to San Francisco in April, a setup for a blowout summer.
I took on a Visual Designer position at StubHub
Majorminor took home a few awards and won a handful of awesome clients
Western Caribbean cruise for our one-year anniversary
Visited Miami and met a longtime friend—for the first time.
Lots of family and friends events scattered throughout the weekend.
Celebrated lots of birthdays and anniversaries
Ate a lot.
Drank a lot.
Biked a lot.
Ate out a lot.
Saw friends more frequently than normal (whattap Vince!)
Words can’t describe how awesome of a mix my summer was—it was the perfect blend of a little bit of rowdiness and chill vibes.
Now we’re going out with a bang. This weekend we’re meeting up for our annual Monterey daytrip/BBQ—9 years strong. Next weekend… Vegas. Yep… we’re doing the Vegas thing. I despise Vegas and what better way to tell her by raising hell there. They market themselves as America’s playground—so it’s only fair. Ha.
» http://kate.upstairsloft.com/2010/08/yo
She gets mad at me for the sake of getting mad at me. I still love her though. That’s why she’s a boss.
My soul spoken through photos of knacks and things on somebody’s Tumblr. Beautiful things. Old thins. Renewed things. Cameras. Bikes. Antiques. Globes. Maps. The objects themselves are captured beautifully.
During our senior year in design school, in 06/07, we were tasked to develop our personal portfolio identities. I went by Upstairsloft, Kate went on as Offbeatscience (soon-to-be Plaid Ruffles) and Rob… well… Majorminor. The three of us kept in close contact while we went on our merry, different ways. Well, I actually went on to marry Kate. Go figure.
While Rob spit hot fire with a few of the top design studios in located in San Francisco, I held mine down at a medium-sized marketing/ad agency and Kate hustled the freelance game. Living separate lives, but never apart, Rob and I joined forces to kick Majorminor into full-fcuking throttle, alongside Lance and Alex.
Today mark’s Majorminor’s one year anniversary.
Most designers know we can spend hours, days, weeks and months tweaking the most minute details of a design that 99% of the world’s population won’t notice. But with crunching time-wasting hours like that, we learned to be efficient with doing good design, practicing an efficient and smart process—otherwise, how are we gonna to stay paid? What about clients? Oh yeah, the guys with the design problems who pay the bills. There’s them too… and we learned to do business with them. Most of them rock. Truth be told.
Anyways, keeping this short, as I’m still grindin’, the theme to our first year goes something like…
“I’ll sell ice in the winter, I’ll sell fire in hell, I am a hustler baby… I’ll sell water to a whale.”
Keeping design real, fresh and stackin them papers since 2009.
Been a while. A long while. A few things have happened in the last 2 months.
1. Majorminor has been working on some great projects and moving at full speed with those. Which brings us to my second point.
2. I took on full-time job as a visual designer at StubHub in mid-June. This has been a smart move in expanding my breadth in learning how an internet company works and how design can drive its marketing efforts. This has also caused us to scale back on Majorminor projects—for the good—allowing us to focus on the kind of work we want to take on. We’ve had quite a few lessons learned which have caused us to reflect on the past year and a half and re-evaluate new goals and objectives. All studios do this. It’s our time. Double design duty equals twice the hustle. I’m happy.
3. Kate and I celebrated our one-year anniversary in the Caribbean. We had three plans which were dependent on the finances. Go to Europe. Go on a cruise. Or road trip down to SoCal and hit up the tourist attractions (like that huge Dinosaur seen in “The Wizard” with Fred Savage. With Majorminor moving at a good speed, my new seat at StubHub and Kate rockin’ it at her studio, we chose to level it out and cruise the Caribbean and kick it at the playaz suite. We had a balcony and a larger room than the rest of the cruisers. We’re also booked for our first and last grown-up hoo-rah in Vegas experience before Kate and I multiply.
Check the Mrs.’s blog, my ninjas. She pretty much broke it down. I love that chick.
» Lampin in the Caribbean
While direct marketing and advertising crawl along the interwebs, it’s not hard to notice the decline in print—but where printed matter matters, it’s well sustained (packaging, editorial [Yes editorial! despite the iFads and kindles] and printed correspondence). Hell, it’s even an art.
There’s no doubt that I’ve been designing a lot for the web—websites, blogs, conversion pages… the list goes on. Without any classes, I’ve learned to design for the web—not code, but design. I’m familiar with what the set of capabilities are per coding language. If I’m not, I know what questions to ask—so I’m not designing blindly. But this is something I’ve picked up from working with and interfacing with developers.
With print, ohhhh print is one beautiful beast to control. Nerd alert. You know that scene in Avatar when Jake Sully wrestles the banshee before linking up and soaring through the wind and all? Yeah. Sorta like that with print. There’s so much prep work that goes into designing for print and there are so many decisions made when the job is on press. Sometimes it’s a headache, sometimes it’s tedious, and it definitely sucks major moose knuckle when clients request changes just before we go to print despite the Final sign-off(s). But the end result is a beautifully, finished piece if you managed to treat her well from the concepting phase to the press check.
I’ve been working with a fair share of start-ups (Majorminor just started up no more than two years ago); and while we have an impressive portfolio to date and our list of capabilities continues to grow, we needed some sort of correspondence to hand-off to push people to our site.
Let me write down our information for you.
Do you have a Post-it note?
You got a pen?
Oh yeah, it’s m-a-j-o-r-m-i-n-o-r-s-f dot com.
Here’s my business card.
Here’s my card.
The response we get and the impression we make when we hand out our cards urge us to adopt a similar model when working with our start-up affiliates who hire us to develop their identities. I’ve even recorded some metric to lay out the success of this program.
Awesome stuff/doing + awesome card = Double the Awesomeness = excited and intrigued people who visit your site.
See. It’s science.
Majorminor Business Cards: Crane Lettra 220#, Third Bay Letterpress
Calvin Ma Photo: Waterford 640gm, Mercurio Brothers Printing
Fun Sponge: Mohawk 130#, Third Bay Letterpress
(click image)
