Tag lutz

Day 42: wed, 13 nov 2013. Finishing a long day with a fancy dinner with visiting designer Joe Finocchiaro.
Oh, friday! You were beautiful.
- We started the day with breakfast (I ate an English-muffin breakfast sandwich and stashed another one in Anna’s bag) and then sat in on a general session.
- Then we raced back to the hotel to catch a taxi to tour Sevnthsin, which was in a cool, industrial part of town. It looked like a really great agency which I was very glad to tour! Besides practical work environments, they had arcade games, a ping pong table, and a small replica of the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks.
- THEN practically all of us had lunch at the hotel on CCAD’s dime.
- Raced back to the convention center in time to sit through a very boring breakout session. Thankfully, Julia and I kept each other occupied with a very dry text message conversation while sitting next to each other.
- After a short refreshment break, we went back into the big auditorium. I wrote a cheeky tweet to John which showed up on the big big screen! We listened to more people talk.
- Had a nerve-wracking portfolio review where I was locked down to a table and random people came by. Got some good advice mixed in with a bunch of lame advice. Classic portfolio reviews.
- Once it was over, there were lots of hugs. Let’s never stop this, okay? Can we keep doing this always?
What a day today was! Let me tell you about it:
- I got a lot of sleep: eight hours of sleep. Better sleep than I’ve gotten in ages.
- We met this super-cool dude Bryan Kahrs in the hotel lobby at 9am. He talked about his life and reviewed some of our portfolios.
- Then we all walked to Chipotle in search of a cheap lunch. After that, Anna, Julia, and I wandered around the city with Lutz, Burleigh, and Vicki Golden, where we found both a really cool street market and the Oscar-Meyer Weinermobile.
- Then we toured Target HQ, which is quaintly nested in downtown Minneapolis, and was great. While there, we took a peek in the Target-branded gift shop.
- After that, we headed over to the convention center to register, where we got a big bag of random things. We then proceeded to shop around the tradeshow floor for even more random things like free posters and paper samples and chapstick thingies.
- Went to the conference’s first general session, which was three hours long and featured a ton of different interesting things (including George Lois!)
- Ate hors d’oeuvres and stuff during a really busy opening reception, where I got to meet Michael Bierut! And do all kinds of other fun stuff, including: spending time with people I enjoy and drinking weird things and trying to coordinate 14 people jumping in unison at a photobooth.
- Rejected my friends’ requests to “go dancing” (whatever the heck that even means) and instead went to a late-night screening of the very nice documentary Sign Painters.
- More sleep, right now? This is so very nice.











