Next career!

It was all swank and pomp tonight at the Adobe Design Achievement Awards, an international awards show for the world's greatest up-and-coming student designers. I got to wear my new shoes and my new dress to the shi-shi affair, which was held at the Royal Ontario Museum downtown. It was very cool to walk around the design exhibit, set up in the main gallery next to a giant T-Rex skeleton, ancient knight's amour, and other museum artifacts. I mingled with the other party-goers, nibbled on the fine hor d'oeuvres, and sipped San Pellegrino as I looked at the posters, and watched the animated shorts and video clips created by the young designers.

Prior to the Awards Gala, I spent the work day touring design studios in Toronto. A fully-sponsored event, the design tour event took a group of 15 to four cutting-edge design studios and lunch at Chinatown’s Asian Legend. The first studio we visited was Oxygen Design + Communications, the ones behind storefront Motoretta and the whole Vespa Canada campaign. Their offices are in a beautiful old brick building, with a gorgeous roof-top garden and surrounded by galleries and colour. Oxygen gave us little presents at the end, consisting of a toothbrush and a Motoretta button.

Next we visited Cuppa Coffee, a studio that does stop-motion animation and produces shows like JoJo's Circus and Celebrity Death Match. It was ultra cool to see animators working away at their computers on one floor, and then see puppet makers making arm-molds on the second. While we were there, one puppet maker was carving out Angelina Jolie's head out of clay, to be used in an upcoming episode of Celebrity Death Match. (watch an episode!): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5146141019960911387&q=celebrity+death+match
They really do move arms 2 millimeters at a time, and build dozens of plastic people to be used for 10 seconds of film! Very cool place to be... and they sent us home with Cuppa Coffee T-shirts!

The coolest offices though were Grip Limited’s, which has a slide and a fireman's pole IN the office!! The main lobby takes you to the second floor, so to move from the top to the bottom floor, you've got to go down the slide (and yes, I got to go down the slide!). Their boardroom is also all glass, made of two-way mirrors so that people inside can look out, and they have a full cafeteria-sized kitchens so that the designers can cook breakfasts for each other every Friday. They also have a neat meeting area, which is a padded “dry” hot tub in the middle of the room. I got an awesome messenger bag from them.

The last studio was Interbrand, an international brand marketing company that was interesting but just alright—no freebies or tchotchkes from them :P.

I was privileged to attend today's fun series of events because of my new identity as assistant publisher of Design Edge Canada magazine. With the mag, I've had so many new and exciting opportunities to hang with designers (who are probably the coolest people in the world) as well as be invited to posh events like the one I went to tonight. However, although I love the idea of being out at these events because of my job as a publisher, I suddenly urge to want to be at these events as a designer…

Is design in my future? My next career perhaps? I would love to have an exhibit one day and have my work on display. I’d love to see my illos on billboards or to have my designs in a magazine. One illustrator that I met a few months ago turned out to be the same illustrator who drew all of the line sketches in Honda’s new Fit campaign. And he’s my age! Hecould be me! I guess all I need now is some talent, a shnazzy computer, and some design skill. Ah well, I can dream…