http://www.aigacharlotte.org/blog/post/87
See The Actual Post…

Here’s What We Said:
AIGA Baltimore
Number of Members: 382
Year Founded: 1989

1. What is your Chapter’s most proud recent accomplishment?
Our Pulp Ink and Hops event last year was a success, even in this economy, bringing approximately 20 design vendors and hundreds of designers together to review the latest and greatest in designer’s tools from printers and paper samples to job resources and design information. Photos available here.

2. Tell us about your Chapter’s Mentorship Program.
Our chapter recently worked on the Create don’t Hate mentorship program which brought together members of the design community and schoolkids to create messages about stopping the ongoing violence. The program involved approximately 20 mentors and two schools here. In the mentorship timeline the mentor groups developed 24 billboards of which seven have been chosen to be displayed around town. We feel promoting this message was a particularly important endeavor in which to undertake given the problems of gun violence in the country and especially in Baltimore, which has had a particularly high murder rate due to the influx of drug culture and the large numbers of youth who do not have or do not take opportunities to become gainfully employed.

3. Tell us about your Chapter’s student programming.
Currently, we offer two portfolio reviews a year, one small and one larger, for students. We also offer studio tours to various locations — including printers and design firms located in the Baltimore area.

4. Tell us how your Chapter uses social media.
We use Facebook to connect with the AIGA Baltimore universe, as well as, Twitter and LinkedIn. We have also started a blog that feeds to our website. These avenues have helped us stay connected with members, as well as, deliver relevant content to them in ways that, based on traffic numbers, they value.

5. What type of food is Baltimore famous for and where can we get some?
The crabcake is the delicacy of choice in Baltimore. While there are plenty of places in Baltimore to go for crabcakes, I’d suggest Faidley’s in Lexington Market. A number of reasons play into that. The scene is a covered marketplace with a nod to its past with stalls, a buzz of activity, the din of talking and the blue-collar working man’s spirit of Baltimore. Baltimore’s Inner Harbor which is famous with the tourists represents the slice of the city that you’d see in its Sunday’s Best. Don’t we all want to know a city when it has on its play clothes?

http://www.baltimoreacts.org/

ROCK TO REBUILD
Join us in a Gala Concert Celebration uniting the spirit of Haiti and Baltimore, featuring Melky and Farel Jean, Mario, Mya and Morgan State University Choir.

February 11, 7:30pm
Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall
Buy TicketsTickets aren’t on Sale Yet
STAY INVOLVED
To learn more, follow us on twitter @baltimoreacts and on Facebook at BaltimoreACTS
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Baltimore ACTS
Haitian-born, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Melky Jean and singer Farel Jean, siblings of Wyclef Jean, will host “Rock to Rebuild,” a gala benefit concert for Haiti, on Feb. 11 at 7:30 p.m. at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Tickets are on sale now!

Grammy-nominated R&B vocalist Mario, acoustic guitarist and singer Adam Day, R&B vocalist Mya and Pop Rock artist Ryan Cabrera along with T-BOZ of TLC are among the national recording artists expected to share the stage with the Morgan State University Choir and international Afro-jazz ensemble The ARKJammers. Multi-platinum producer Darryl Pearson, who has worked with Madonna, Justin Timberlake and Chris Cornell, is the concert’s music director.

A poster project to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders: http://www.creativepro.com/article/join-haiti-poster-project

http://www.orange-blog.com/2010/02/04/lemonade/

Alright, that’s probably true because I know very little about Search Engine Optimization. But I’ve always been a big-picture guy frankly. And the big picture here is that a print designer who grew up in a in-house design environment who worked solely on those type of projects, my best education is looking at the world outside of the web and creating associative experiences. One such corollary is the use of the satellite television guide to manage my television watching.

In the past, not to distant if you ask me, when I wanted to watch tv, I just turned the thing on and sat down and watched. I’d start movies in the middle, I’d hunt and peck for shows I like. I’d watch stuff I otherwise wouldn’t AND I’d know when the shows I wanted to watch were coming on.

It seems to me that I’m now smarter and dumber about the way I watch television. Nowadays, the biggest difference between tv now and tv then is the use of the guide information that networks use to tell me a bout the programs coming on the tv. Guide information can be as detailed as to tell me if the Top Gear episode I’m planning to watch is a rerun that I may have seen or can be as empty as letting me know that there is simply a show called Top Gear. These are big differences and not every network uses them to their fullest extent.

Every channel would benefit from having the most detailed information on episodes to accommodate the modern television-watching habits. Some years back, a lecturer to MICA (sorry, can’t remember whom) referenced research that showed that MTV watchers watch an average of six contiguous minutes before turning. I hadn’t thought about whether the research asks or answers if they turn back!!! But the fact of the matter is when I channel-surf, I’m surfing around the dead-spots and surfing into the live moments. Can the guide help me with that? Probably. Could the guide help me tune in at just the moment when Snookie gets punched… (I know, I know. Too much TV.)

What if the NFL Replay broadcast told me the exact moment to tune in to see that great interception in an otherwise boring game, it might revolutionize Sundays for men. (BTW: I had a female client once who lamented that her husband watched all three games on Sundays. I told her accept the first two—1pm and 4pm starts—and ask him to be reasonable about the third—8pm.)

How does this relate to your website or your artwork? Doing the work to adequately tag your posts, your artwork, build meta keywords into your site allows your universe of followers and those who don’t follow you to find you and educated themselves on exactly what you and they have in common interest. While you may have a more tightly-knit universe of followers who follow you just for you, recognize that many of us are tangential followers. We follow similar and like interests.

Keeping your tags focused can help solidify your audience and represents a “brand promise” to the potential or current consumer. If on the AIGA Baltimore blog I only talked about sports—which I totally could (I struggle not to)—would the true value of the blog be reached for creatives? Possibly, but not certainly.

We live in the world of the iTunes single track download, the single Google image search and the Today Show interview of the unknown who no one ever heard of who is expert at that one thing and all these are examples of the fleeting attention of the consumer. Build adequate planning for these experiences as well as the more in-depth experiences which you may already have and reap the added attention that can be gained from it be it more hits to your site or more attention to your initiatives.

Our friends at Production Club of Baltimore asked us to give this mention…

Interactive Start to Finish

From launch to performance report, learn best practices and innovative ways to implement a successful interactive marketing campaign. Topics will include: email, SEO, rich media and Google analytics.

Join guest speaker Matthew Kilmurry, Interactive Marketing Manager at Crosby Communications, for Insight, innovation and an Introspective look at e-marketing.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010
5:30 – 8:00 p.m.
Baltimore Museum of Industry
415 Key Highway
Baltimore, MD 21230

Cocktails and Light Dinner

Members: FREE as always
Non-members: $20

RSVP required for this event: events@productionclubofbaltimore.org

As part of our effort to increase reach, increase conversation about design and all things good in that respect, AIGA Baltimore will be developing a blog about Baltimore, AIGA, AIGA Baltimore, design and issues in the industry and if you read the legalese we wont be limited to that. (We need someone to actually write the legalese, by the way.) Anyway one guarantee for continued notes and news is to keep the conversation going back and forth. Let us know what you think (“that was  terrible”) or good thoughts and post ideas are welcome as well…