“xDay is all about passion,” Associate Creative Director, Marvin Gaviola says. “It’s inspirational. It feeds my creative soul.”
This Friday marks our second xDay of the year and our XPLANErs are overflowing with excitement. With a full day put aside for innovation, our team has been both prepping to add on to their last xDay projects and planning out new creative endeavors for their eight hours.
Below are a few more projects our XPLANE team has worked on during their last xDay:
Team/Individual: Program Management and Design
Goal: Learn the basics of Adobe Illustrator
Our Program Managers teamed up with Junior Designer Nicole Bittner to learn what they called Adobe 911: simple design changes for last minute client requests. In this course, the PM team learned straight from a designer how to deal with quick emergency requests from our customers, from making small text/color changes to preparing a file for print. They documented these processes in a reference guide that the team now uses.
“It’s great to have this extra time to focus,” Program Manager Megan Donaldson added about her xDay. “We had the chance to work on little things that are important to our clients, even though it wasn’t direct client work.“
Team/Individual: Marvin Gaviola, Associate Creative Director
Goal: Translate complex ideas to visual flashcards
How do you visually communicate the term “logistics?” Or “alignment?” Or “synthesis?” Associate Creative Director Marvin Gaviola spent his first xDay putting these complicated ideas into a set of drawings. This artistic deck of flashcards will function as a starting point for our designers, helping to accelerate their own sketches and processes. Based on a list of terms put together by the entire XPLANE team, these cards help map out commonly-used, complex topics that we often hear from our clients.
Team/Individual:Tim May, Associate Creative Director and Rich Moore, Senior Designer
Goal: Create a podcast
XPLANErs Tim May and Rich Moore joined forces on xDay to discuss Portland’s vast design communities and bring them all together in audio form. The two put together a plan to create a podcast with personal stories from local artists and insights from a designer’s perspective. “We chose to make a podcast so people could listen to it where they want to, when they want to,” Tim says on his first recording. On their first xDay, the two interviewed designer Cole Reed, discussing his life, his process, and his background of design and development.