Category: General Posts

The story is an adventure on the high seas and on the faraway Mollusk Island. An orphan boy named Peter and his mysterious new friend, Molly, overcome bands of pirates and thieves in their quest to keep a magical secret safe and save the world from evil. Villains include the scary but somehow familiar pirate captain “Black Stache” and the ferocious crocodile Mister Grin.

Molly and Peter take a voyage with Alf, James, Thomas, Prentiss, Tubby Ted, Slank and Little Richard from a filthy, crime-ridden port in Old England across the turbulent sea. Aboard the Never Land is a trunk that holds the “greatest treasure on earth,” thought by its pursuers to be gold or jewels but revealed to be “starstuff,” an alien chemical element (delivered to Earth by meteor strikes) that can either give people and animals magic powers, or kill them, depending on the dosage and other factors. The trunk is moved from place to place through storms and sea battles: once in a dry, guarded cabin, next in a ship full of greedy pirates, and then out in the open sea.

While on the ship, both Peter and Molly become close as they take on Slank and many other villains, including pirates. While they try to keep the starstuff out of the wrong hands, the Never Land shipwrecks and Molly saves Peter from death, and they fly for an unknown island.

When the shipwreck led them to a mysterious island, known as Mollusk Island, Molly is kidnapped by Slank and Peter saves her from him, along with the help of James, Thomas, Prentiss, and Tubby Ted who all go by the gang name, The Lost Boys. Peter also does battle against Black Stache and cuts off his hand with a sword; the amputee pirate will adopt the moniker “Captain Hook“. The book ends with Molly and Peter saying goodbye to each other and with Peter promising to visit her in England. Molly and her father, Lord Leonard Aster, return to the real world, while Peter and the Lost Boys remain on Mollusk Island, which they rename “Neverland,” the name of the ship that was shipwrecked. (However, the sequels still call the island Mollusk Island more often than Neverland.)

To launch the BU Department of Theatre’s exciting upcoming season of productions required a dynamic image. I think we found it with this great photograph taken from ‘Sense and Sensibility’!

Great team project. Six student teams pitching against each other for their final assignment of the semester. Thank you to Chris and Maggie at Simantel, and especially Doug and Eileen for your vision for the BIG PICTURE initiative.

MARKETING GOALS
The focus of the project at hand is to promote The Big Picture Art Festival. This festival’s success is dependent on getting people to attend and participate in the festival as it is intended to be an interactive experience. It is very important to our organization that under-served areas of our community are also informed about the event, encouraged to participate and feel welcome and needed. We would like to increase public participation and attendance at the festival by appealing to the entire region, not just local Peoria residents.

In addition, consideration for the wayfinding system on the day of the festival, as well as possible ways to track the number of guests attending.

Continue reading “‘Big Picture’ Peoria Street Festival”

Single Serve is Here to Stay (c/o The Hartman Group)

Certain categories of multi-serve packaged food seem to have some staying power with 3+ person households, primarily because certain brands have enough habitual brand loyalty and appeal within homes that they empower food sharing and result in very rapid consumption rates at the weekly level. Multi-serve packaging makes eminent sense to these consumers, because there is very little time for these foods to go stale once the big bag gets opened. Potato chips are a good example in larger households.

But as America’s households increasingly involve 3 or fewer people, the scope for multi-serve packaging itself starts to look quite bleak. And because the variety of packaged foods has increased, thanks mostly to the rapid influx of specialty foods in recent years, there is so much variety at home these days in packaged “staple” goods that we often rotate frequently between products at the weekly level. This makes it even harder to predict when that large bag of chips or that liter of soymilk will really get finished before they go bad.

Single serve packaging is fulfilling an unmet need to manage waste and to acknowledge our increasingly individualistic eating patterns in a highly fragmented, fickle culture of eaters who think that every day is a good day to try something new in the world of food.

So, the brief was to create a single serving meal packaging/container for a ‘gourmet’ quality meal. It should securely hold three or four meal items, have strong shelf appeal, but also have taken into consideration its environmental footprint.

Continue reading “(Gourmet) Meal For One Packaging”

All promotions for this classic of English literature have been done to death, so what better way to approach such a defined period piece than with a pop art theme!

Adapted by Kate Hamill from the novel by Jane Austen

Never out of print since its 1807 debut, Jane Austen’s classic first novel comes to vibrant life in this acclaimed stage adaptation. Facing bleak prospects, the disinherited young Dashwood sisters discover love, endure heartbreak, and achieve triumph as England swerves between the reason (“Sense”) of the late 18th century and the surging romanticism (“Sensibility”) of the 19th. An indelible gallery of lovers, rogues, greedy in-laws, generous friends, and witless twits, are rendered with Austen’s spectacular language and benevolent humor, and staged with ingenious theatricality and style.

Performances Thurs-Sat, 7:30PM and Sundays at 2PM

Thursday-Saturday 7:30 pm, Sunday 2:00 pm
The Hartmann Center for the Performing Arts
1423 St. James, Peoria, IL 61625

Heinz (Ketchup) is 150 years old this year. The brief was to create an integrated campaign that put this iconic superstar of the condiments center stage instead of a supporting role.

Continue reading “Heinz Ketchup 150th Anniversary”

Next branding brief for our junior graphic design students – Heinz Tomato Ketchup. 150 years old this year. Put it center stage instead of the support act to a meal. Give it the recognition it deserves. Celebrate its past 150 years and make it an irreplaceable brand for the next 150 years…. easy!

Step one: Brainstorn the brand. Nothing better than a good old mind map.

Always good to start the semester with a good intro to Brand Experience – and what better way than with a ‘Self-Branding’ assignment. As always, students are trying to create a beautiful, tactile branded resume package with the intention of it landing on the desk of an individual creative head for a potential internship position.

Continue reading “Resume ‘Experience’”