Happy New Year everyone! As you might notice you are receiving this week's edition of Creative Juice on a Tuesday. As hopeful as I was, writing this newsletter after the NYE festivities here in the Philippines was difficult. But hey! Here we are!
TL:DR
- SOMETHING GORGEOUS: A Rainbow Hallway Made of Numerals
- PORTFOLIO OF THE WEEK: Personality, Personality, Personality
- This Passion Project Kicks A$$
- Mamma Mia This Paster is Delicious!
- Your New Year's Hangover Solution
- One Gram: Welcome to the Auntieverse, My Brain Needs a Hug
- ONE LESSON: 10 Things I'm Designing into My 2024
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Something Gorgeous
A Rainbow Hallway Made of Numerals
100 colors no.50 "SERPENTI" by Emmanuelle moureaux
I am manifesting in 2024 that every hallway I ever own will look like this. The italian luxury fashion brand, BVLGARI, celebrated it's 75th anniversary with a series of creative collaborations with contemporary artists from around the world at an exhibition in Tokyo appropriately titled 'Infinite Tale'.
This installation by architect, artist, and designer, Emmanuelle Moureaux, slapped the crusties right off my eyes with a big dose of dopamine. While absolutely gorgeous, I highly recommend reading through Emmanuelle's description of the installation. I LOVE the concept she put together for this project. The installation uses roman numerals from 1 to 100, written on 100 large acrylic panels, with a gradation of 100 colors. I'm missing some numbers there but oof I just love that.
If you are in Tokyo, hurry to see it before there are hordes of instagrammers waiting in line for their unaware but somehow captured photo because this is absolutely gorgeeeeeeeeous.
Portfolio of the Week
Personality, Personality, Personality
Tania Natalnael
Have you heard of the personality hire? It's that one person that gets hired at a company because they have an amazing energy and when they are around people it's contagious. That is what I think of when I see Tania's design portfolio website. While she has amazing work featured on her portfolio website, the first thing that jumps out at me is the personality she has injected into her design portfolio website.
Everything from neon green and earthy color palette, to the copy, and playful scribbles. Tania's design portfolio website gets me excited to potentially meet and work with her. Digging into her homepage, I love how she has incorporated scroll animations and video thumbnails to draw the eye to her recent work. You'll notice her homepage is nothing super fancy, Tania does a great job keeping it simple and driving visitors to view the most important part, her work.
When we dive into her project pages, you will find Tania has put together some great case studies of her work. I'm not 100% sure, but have a pretty good hunch that Tania has designed each project page to be slight different from the previous. She presents a rich page layout that includes everything from the project overview, to preliminary research, initial design work, and outcomes.
I also want to callout, that last week I shared a TikTok about how to create amazing design stories just like this for your portfolio website that you can watch here. Tania has nailed this 👌
Score: 7.8/10
Built with: Framer
Creative Finds
This Passion Project Kicks A$$
Spirulina & Chlorella by Alexey Firstov
If I ever hear the excuse that you don't know what kind of passion project you should start, I will reach through this screen and slap some design sense into you. Alexey took his mission of healthy eating and turned into a beautifully designed project filled with color, motion, data, and texture. Please do yourself a favor and check out the full project and all of it's motion glory.
Wow 👏👏👏
Mamma Mia This Paster is Delicious!
Pasters Visual Identity by Roman & Jenya Shtein
I am currently traveling with my friends who are all from Italy so this made me chuckle. I don't want to jump to say that it's a 'trend' but I have been loving the script to sans-serif pairings lately.
Your New Year's Hangover Solution
Hangover Whopper Campaign by DM9
Just what I needed to start my 2024 year on the right foot. A mobile app that can tell me how much burger I need to cure my hangover. This is very on-brand for me, however I am team McDonald's.
One Gram
Welcome to the Auntieverse, My Brain Needs a Hug
@niceaunties
I'm not sure how exactly I would describe the Auntieverse other than it's like if your brain was having a super intense psychedelic experience and during this 'trip', your brain was connected to the newest Ai content creation tools available that allowed you to illustrate these vivid, humorous, and somewhat overwhelming worlds where all the characters were either kind Asian aunties or something that would be found in said auntie's homes.
This post specifically is called 'Bear to Bull' or B2B, a collaboration between Auntieverse and another Ai artist by the name @pancakepie360. The short film presents a holiday parade, role-played by various animals that escaped their earthly zoos.
One Lesson
10 Things I'm Designing into My 2024
Last week's CJ I shared 20 things that I thought made my 2023 pretty amazing and will continue into 2024. This week I want to share 10 things that I plan to design into my life to make it even better than 2023. First, I'll share my approach to making things like 'goals' become reality because after 20 years or so of trying different methods, I feel like this is the one that has stuck for me and works.
I start off by sitting down with a pen and paper and thinking real hard about what it is I want to do, where I want to be, etc. This is not a end-all-be-all list, it may grow, it may shrink, but for me it's important to get these ideas down on paper. From there, I add them to my Notion board with nice little covers and icons so that I can visually see them every time I open up Notion as I use it everyday (let me know if you want me to share this as a template). From there, inside each 'goal' or idea, I have a few bullet points that I'll write down the actionable steps that I can take to achieve these. The important thing that I have kept in mind with this approach is to acknowledge and remind myself that these are things that will take time. They most likely will not be done tomorrow, next week, or maybe within the year. But personally, when I set myself to something, and see it everyday, I work that much hard to get there.
Now, 10 things I will be designing into my 2024:
1.) Taking spanish class and mastering a second language.
2.) Writing 52 editions of Creative Juice along with 12 editions of Portfolio Squeezes and 12 editions of Beefy Briefs
3.) Being an amazing Uncle
4.) Build a platform that will connect amazing design and creative talent with sick clients.
5.) Launch a design studio that works 7-8 months of the year.
6.) Host a bi-monthly or video call to connect with creatives from around the world.
7.) Live in Bali for another year.
8.) Travel through more of Asia.
9.) Get another tattoo or three.
10.) Create materials(book/course) to help designers and creatives make the best portfolio website and market their creativity so they can live how they want.
I hope your 2024 is off to great start and I am exciting to see what we can make together!
PS. What are your goals for 2024? Are they getting more clients, getting hired, or have nothing to do with design at all? Send me your goals with a reply and I'll see if I can help in any way.
PPS. Does anyone know a video editor that might be able to help me with some editing for the portfolio reviews I do? Feel free to shoot me a note or DM on IG 🙏
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