Thursday, April 10, 2008
Jason and I got up at approximately 330a this morning to head to Portland, OR for a design meeting with our new client Lewis & Clark. On many accounts, it was somewhat surreal to be driving to the Oakland Airport for my first out-of-town business meeting, particularly at such an obscene hour, but I was very excited about my new occupational captor not only paying me to do what I love, but actually paying me to travel! I’d been trying to accomplish this feat for a decade via touring with my various bands, but that was basically traveling without paying all for the low low price of being crammed into a van with a minimum of four other people and surviving on one solid meal a day and a lot of cheap snack food (and no, pb&j on the invariably crushed loaf bread is being counted as the ’solid meal’; I don’t know if you’ve ever been on tour or not, but that damn bread found a way to get itself crushed every single time, regardless of how careful we were with it or what kind of safe-esque cooler we put it in… every single time). At any rate, yes!!! getting paid to travel! The plane ride was a great bonding experience for Jason and I, chattering away on all manner of topics, including but not limited to: the typography of in-flight magazines, the irony of christian death metal (the best part was Jason whisper-screaming “JESUUUUUUUUUS” on a Portland-bound airplane at like 6a), and several other wildly entertaining bullet points that my sleep-deprived mind mis-assimilated into the dark recesses of my memory.
Tonya, the VP, saved us from the blustery Portland weather just outside the airport, and off we went in search of breakfast-related items in a local health food store. A cinnamon raisin bagel (hold the vegan cream cheese because instead of it being in a logical place, like with the rest of the other similarly refrigerated miscellany, it was hidden in the fine cheeses section right next to the exit; silly me, of course it would have been there rather than in the store-length section at the back with the vegan sour cream, soy margarine, tofu pate, etc), a pear, an apple, and some odwalla juice later, we arrived at Lewis & Clark’s beautiful campus.
We met up with the L&C designers-extraordinare David and Noah at their on campus cafe prior to heading off to our first meeting of the day. These guys are totally rad, like our little design mole double-agents in L&C. They briefed us on the day and whisked us away to the aforementioned meeting that was to be held with an assortment of L&C staff, with which we discussed their needs/desires/ideas for the site. We became aware of the prevailing lack of a sense of community within the three schools that encompass L&C (the college, the grad school and the law school), as well as the seemingly disinterested-in-donating alumni. After having discussed our ideas and potential strategies with them to resolve these two issues, we strolled off to a campus tour with our comrade David, then off to lunch, and inevitably our for real hardcore design meeting with the creative team of L&C.
This meeting was excellent; I feel like everyone walked away with a lot of new ideas and a great deal of newfound wind in their creative sails. Jason, Tonya and I presented our ideas and inspiration for the coming site redesign, and everyone seemed to come to the consensus that we are looking for an “organic”, “hand-made”, and “experimental” design; looking to the skies as it were. Teeming with inspiration, we returned home and began think-tanking our ideas to fruition; the result, I expect, will be a new chapter in White Whale’s portfolio, and an even further refinement to our new team dynamic.
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