But it wasn’t enough. I was staring straight at that logo in big, heavy Century Gothic, which though a relatively new typeface, it was designed based on drawings of the late 1930s, which at that time were inspired by earlier, turn of the century advances in machines. Precise letters. Geometric shapes. Boring and unremarkable for today’s “hot new thing.” It was also very “newspapery.” By that I mean that it’s what newspaper people do (ahem, the parent company is a newspaper agency). Take something and instead of freshening it up, make it more mundane and familiar. But that’s not how you win awards.

Anyway, I was competing with this typeface in our modern, slick Google-age. It helped that I reversed it out. Then I needed something with serifs to make those large smooth curves in Century Gothic seem less overwhelming. But too elegant would defeat the point, and we’d look ridiculous. I landed on FF Meta Serif, a fairly new face from Erik Spiekermann, made in 2007 to be added to his decade-old (and popular) FF Meta family. While it was serifed indeed, it wasn’t super long, ornate serifs you’d see in Sabon or Miller, and not too slab-serif, either. It sat smack in the middle of elegant and modern, sophisticated and aspirational. It worked perfectly.

I set the front up with right-aligned text that matched the white line separating the blue and the brown on top of the card.

The back (not seen in the photo) was an all-brown back with all the names of the cities that Examiner.com had (at the time) editions. The cities were a screened brown on the solid background behind them.

After this, the envelopes flowed easily, making them, in essence, a large business card. I moved the return address to the bottom-left and used the same screened-names on the flap. It was a custom conversion.

The letterhead was trickier. Not wanting to print the reverse side in such heavy dosage, I opted to add a bar across the bottom, still including the cities, but not as large as the back of the envelope or not as encompassing as the back of the card. In the end, because we printed on Cougar Bright White, the size and placement helped balance the white space.

All in all, it was a fun project, and one that helped get me my promotion to creative director. Rumor has it, though, they’re about to change the logo again in 2010. Oh well.

The Write What You Live recruitment campaign came from a bunch of people at Examiner.com. It’s genesis was started by an assistant channel manager at Examiner.com. Her manager, my friend, couldn’t figure her out as she was constantly late, had no focus or goals. Turns out she’d rather be in marketing or advertising and therefore spent her time coming up with taglines and foolishly pitching them to me. But for all the jayvee ideas, to her credit she came up with the tagline “We write what we live” and I turned this into a successful internet campaign including a video advertisement and a well-received Commission Junction affiliate program, complete with over 600 banner ads for affiliates to use.

The idea was that because too many people were dismayed by the amount of credibility one would need to write for us. Or experience. Turns out, you needed neither, just passion and some basic English. So we tapped into the passion pit: you love to do something, right? What is that? Now go write about it. It’s how we got people writing about Boise Gardening, Philadelphia Lacrosse, Seattle Disc Golf and much more. Turns out everyone thinks they’re an expert on something. Go figure. It, in essence, was both an informative tool to explain who we were and a recruitment tool to get others to apply.

This is how the campaign was presented to the client — my bosses — on how to deliver the message to masses in each city (Examiner.com—at the time I was creating this—was serving 110 cities nationwide). The idea was to put this on billboards, bus stops, etc. to draw interest. We also used them in 300 x 250 banner ads and other online and traditional (print) advertising.

Where the campaign ended up running was in various trades,  conventions (Great American Beer Festival, etc.), and job fairs. Each ad depicts a happy person doing something they love, with the appropriate “channel” (the basic navigation blocks of the web site) called out.

Here are some more images:

As the Creative Director at Examiner.com, I helped to secure a sponsorship deal with the 2009 Great American Beer Festival in Denver. With this new exposure opportunity, we needed something that would convey our enthusiasm to the beer crowd visually, so the decision to make a “beer logo” and brand some tee shirts, coasters, beer pints and a contest page with with logo was made.

This logo was the sole mark on all ads and collateral for the festival, including the microsite I created to showcase the coverage, information and contest pertaining to the festival.

The other pieces of the branding puzzle were solved with an add for the GABF program:

And some banner ads:

“What’s so bad about this Scottish play?
Visit the Denver Theatre Examiner’s page to find out.”

Of course, the theater company hated the ad.

The audience, however, loved it.