Critical Mass – Alison Garnett

Today's speaker was Alison Garnett, the creative director from Critical Mass. She demonstrated that it is possible to have excellent work-family balance and have an established career. According to Alison, EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE. She could be a great role model for many of us in the program. I was really impressed with her presentation.

MY NAME IS SUPERCAPACITY

• Inspired from washing machine.
• Has two daughters with her husband, and three dogs.
• Family comes first, and jobs come second.
• Has diverse interests and loves to engage in hobbies in her spare time.

BACKGROUND

• Obtained a drawing and painting degree at OCAD.
• She then took the Sheridan web design program after graduating from OCAD.
• Got the job right away after graduation, then worked in a company called “ICE”. While she was there, she realized that she really wanted to work with the web. The company specialized in live events, so there was not much exposure in the digital field. She created her first website without much coding knowledge.
• Then she worked at Henderson Bas as a freelance web designer.
• She also worked at Taxi for 6 years. 

WHAT ABOUT NOW?

• She has been working at Critical Mass for 2 years as the Creative Director.
• She is the jack-of-all-trades - designer/art director/project manager/account manager/stylist/photographer/blogger/writer/illustrator.

HENDERSON BAS:

• Clients include: Molson Canadian, Levi’s, Nike.
• Redesigned many established brands and won a lot of awards

ADVICE FOR THE FIRST JOB:

• During your first job, you should try to get as much experience as you can before moving onto the next one.

TAXI:

• Mini: it’s the coolest job ever at Taxi. Got exposure to big brands.

• Townshoes: came up with the idea of using beautiful things to match with the products

• LCBO: Small budgets for a micro site. Required improvisation for Greece wine site.

• Cadillac Fairview: Branded the whole building near Nathan Phillip Square and designed the website. It’s a sustainable building. Each color represents a certain part of the building.
• Taxi required working equally on print and digital projects, but in Critical Mass the work mainly focuses on large scale interactive projects.

CRITICAL MASS:

• Has the opportunity to work with large scale interactive projects.
• First job was redesigning the luxury furniture place: an e-commerce site featuring over 4000 furniture. After analyzing the project, she realized that she needed to shoot photos for the website and retouch the photos.

• Sears: Redesign without changing the HTML. The website was for the Easter Holiday. Low budget. In order to win over the pitch, you need to make a demo reel to show what you can do for them. Other options such as Facebook, Apps, Mobile showing how company’s branding looks like will be helpful as well.

• Rolo: Worked on a Facebook app. Got a chance to get lot of chocolates and ice creams. Kept the creative team really happy.

SUPERCAPACITY: Her own design company

• Always likes to create novelty items outside family time.
• Spends weekends doing creative activities: sewing, painting, photographing
• Loves to design identity. ?The business card she did ended up getting published in “How Magazine”, and won an award.
• My Lalaland: won a contest for redesigning the website and won a year of free web hosting.

IT’S JUST ADVERTISING: We don’t save lives. Have fun and make cool sh*t.

CAREER APPLICATION

• Business card is really important.
• Hand out visuals such as the sheet of stickers or magnets that brand yourself.
• Interview: 75% works, and 25% personality
• mood.com. Instant magnet!
• Don’t be afraid to ask for cards.

CONTACT:

Alison Garnett

http://www.alisongarnett.com