Switch

A trip into the lair

Just as I thought we had escaped the nightmare of thumb drive monotony, Callie and I found out that we had another 100 of the little things to unwrap, load, and repackage this week.  But, after last week, 100 was a piece of cake; we tore through that box!

We also started work on the logo for our intern blog section (what you’re reading right now!).  For this special task we were to work with one of Switch’s Art Directors, Lee Essner.  This led me on my first excursion down to the designer’s area on the fourth floor.

I had been to the fourth floor once to get some supplies, but I had never strayed too far from the lit areas by the stairs.  As I found out this week, designers are creatures of the night and prefer a dim, shadowy habitat.  When I went to meet with Lee for the first time, I felt like I was entering some sort of designer lair with just the glow of computer screens to illuminate the pathway before me.

At the end of the path was Lee.  Although being just a few years older than me, he possesses the wisdom of a time weathered elder and imparts his knowledge on others through his own cheerful, soft spoken manner.  Had I not known beforehand, I would never have thought that he could be such a force on the baseball diamond as he is.

Lee shared with us his method for creative inspiration and set us out on the search for ideas for our logo.  We came up with some good ones and gave Lee what he needed to get going on the artwork.  Start preparing now because its gonna be awesome for next week’s blog entry.

One especially tasty nugget I picked up from Lee is to start collecting things or examples of work that you think are cool.  He said that he has a hard drive “full of just crap I’ve saved over the years.”  This way when you are thinking of something and you remember that one piece of whatever from 6 months ago you can go and find it, no problem.  I started my collection today with this:

O, and one more thing I learned, Communication Arts is the bomb dot com.