AIGA Baltimore

Let’s Recap the 2nd Annual Baltimore Design Week!

We totally believe in feedback.

Back in October, we went all out for our friends and colleagues in the Baltimore design community and we’ve been hearing about it ever since. If you haven’t emailed, tweeted, or talked to us face-to-face about your experience, we’d like to hear from you. Complements, suggestions, or criticisms: the more we receive, the better Design Week gets.

Okay, that said, let’s get to the wrap-up..!

Design Week opened up with a bike race through Baltimore to find and capture the each letter of the phrase” AIGA Baltimore 25″. Participants sent their photos back to our judges at Canton’s Myth & Moonshine. Search for #AIGATypeRace on Instagram or check out the Charm City Type Race photos on Facebook.

Then on Monday, we welcomed former design director of NYTimes.com, Khoi Vinh, to the 2640 Space in Charles Village for an evening panel discussion about interactive design. Vinh was joined by Andy Mangold of Friends of the Web, April Osmanof of Fastspot, and James Pannafino of Millersville University. The conversation included topics ranging from the evolving purpose of the web and the technical specifics of responsive design to the Baltimore art and tech scene. You can read more about what we learned here.

Next up for Design Week was a type design workshop with Mucca Design’s creative director, Matteo Bologna. Held at one of Stevenson University School of Design’s swanky Mac labs, attendees were given a hands-on tutorial on how to manipulate letterforms and craft their own typefaces. Matteo demonstrated the quick and dirty overview of formatting characters in Glyphs, a font editing software. Being a Bezier curve master certainly helps!

Thursday was AIGA Baltimore’s 25th anniversary, so we just went ahead and threw a huge party in Fell’s Point at the Waterfront Hotel featuring our guests of honor: the chapter’s past presidents. Baltimore Print Studios donated super-cool thank-you certificates, hot off the letterpress, to help us recognize the presidents, their respective boards, and everything they accomplished over the last 25 years. Studio, in-house, and freelance creatives from all over the city showed up, (and some students too), making it a very memorable and fun evening for all (Well, most of us can remember it, anyway). Check out those memorable moments on our Facebook page.

The next morning, we took visitors on three studio tours, each one unique in their approach to design and what services they offer.

First, we went to ADG Creative in Columbia where we got an in-depth look at their ultra-modern setup, well-equipped with innovative technologies for interactive design and video production. From there, we headed back to Fell’s Point, dropping in on Orange Element to hear about their process, tour their 3-story row house studio, and look at some of their clever design work, including some enviable wrapping paper. Our last visit was to Gilah Press where we got to see how their top-quality cards and wedding invitations are created in a surprisingly old-school way.

We invited our participants out to Birroteca  after the studio tours to join us in a collective sigh of relief as another fantastic Baltimore Design Week came to a close. Thanks to everyone who supported us, volunteered, or attended the events. You’re totally our new (or our old) best friend. And if you couldn’t make it, don’t worry because we’re going to start planning next year’s events shortly after our holiday break and we’ve already got some stellar ideas.

Want to see more pictures? Check them out here.

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