About the Event

Join us in person for ON Brand 2023!

July 13, 2023 | Creighton University Harper Conference Center

AAF Nebraska, AMA Lincoln, AMA Omaha and PRSA Nebraska are teaming up to give our members and the larger branding community a day filled with inspiration, practical education, and networking. The ON Brand conference is a unique career development and networking opportunity. We are excited to introduce you to influential speakers from across the nation, as well as major players in the Omaha branding community. We hope you take advantage of everything ON Brand has to offer.

About the Event

The ON Brand 2022 Conference is a collaboration of the American Advertising Federation Nebraska (AAF Nebraska), American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA Nebraska), American Marketing Association Omaha (AMA Omaha), and Public Relations Society of America (PRSA Nebraska). This is the fourth year these organizations have combined efforts to unify their voices for the advancement of their members, the community, and the region. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear from national, regional, and local thought leaders in the fields of advertising, marketing, communications and public relations.

Please visit www.onbrandcon.com for the conference agenda, speaker details and breakout session descriptions.

Prices

Conference registration fees: $150.00 Professional, $50.00 Students

Promo codes for AIGA Nebraska are being sent this week.

Member registration is $125.00. Students $50 – No promo code is needed for students.

*k+r strategies

To the creative community,

We stand at the crossroads of complacency and action. Before we go down the path of action, we must be aware of our past.

The problem. 

In 1914, there were a group of white-men who formed what we’ve come to know as AIGA. When formed, this organization was white- and men-only and we must acknowledge the systemic issues this has created. In lifting up only the white-male the voices of women and BIPOC have been silenced. In 1920, AIGA became the first graphic arts organization to include women designers but didn’t elect their first woman president till 1958. It is unclear in AIGA’s history when it began to desegregate.

Over the past 30 years, there have been attempts at making AIGA ‘less-white’. National task forces have had troubles gaining traction and making actionable change. AIGA continues to make mistakes; struggling with elitism, remaining relevant and current, and continuing to white-wash. I want to give thanks and credit to Antoinette Carol for holding us accountable and highlighting the issues of white supremacy within AIGA. She isn’t the first or last to voice concerns of these issues within AIGA. We must credit all the individuals who have both voiced their concerns and those who have worked on these task forces over the decades.

The intersection.

Our local chapters—while having a charter affiliation with AIGA ‘National’—operate as independent non-profit organizations. While we have a voice at National we have the power to change our chapter. In 2016, our first Diversity & Inclusion Director, Cathy Solarana began the change. But, more must be done, and we have the power to change.

We know that silence is not acceptable and being an ally isn’t enough. AIGA Nebraska needs to work to support marginalized people in our creative community through our organization. We need to work to be actively anti-racist; to not actively make change is dangerous and not what we stand for.  We must take more- and better-informed action. And that starts now.

Our approach.

George Aye’s article, Dismantling White Supremacy Culture Within AIGA, inspired us. To give our organization the serious attention and energy it deserves, it takes more than our volunteer board can give while running monthly programming—during a pandemic nonetheless.

So first, we are going to pause ALL local chapter programming. Right now we need to listen, and better understand the community we serve. We plan to engage paid-professionals to help us embark on the learning and training we need as an organization to better meet the challenge of systemic racism, white supremacy, and oppression.

To our paying members.

We understand you will likely have concerns. Your membership dues will be vital to helping our local chapter during this time. You will still have access to all the benefits provided by National. We invite you to be engaged in this work. We want to hear your stories and through your insight better serve our community.

We must change the DNA of our organization. 

We don’t know how long it will take to make the proper changes to our organization; to be diverse, inclusive and build equity. This isn’t a brief endeavor. We are just starting a process that could easily take 12-24 months. As part of the processes, we will be reviewing and revising how we function, our board composition, and making sure we’re serving the correct community. We’re going to need your help.

If you are interested in supporting our local efforts we invite you to be a part of this change.

Contact us at community@nebraska.aiga.org to start a conversation or fill out our Community Feedback form.

Dear AIGA Nebraska Members & Community,

In July 2020, we promised to work towards changing the DNA of our organization to increase diversity and inclusivity and to build equity (DE&I). We pledged to review and revise our board composition and to engage paid professionals to help us embark on the learning and training we need to better combat the issues surrounding systemic racism, white supremacy, and oppression in our organization and in the design community. In September, we paused all programming so that we could set aside the time and effort necessary to this process. We still have a long way to go, but we’d like to update you on some of the steps we’ve taken and our plans for the coming months.

Board Re-organization

One of our goals is making sure that our board is serving the correct individuals and organizations in our community and giving them a greater voice. To that end, we’ve changed the way the board is structured so that every board member has a vote and a say in how we move forward, regardless of their role. In addition, more committee positions are available to member and non-member professionals and students. Committees include governance, DE&I, education, membership, programming, communication, in-house, and external partnership. The committees will be chaired by board directors and open to any volunteer participation. We hope that this will help open AIGA to more diverse voices and perspectives.

Our local board is still majority white, and we’ve been actively trying to recruit Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) from the community. Many roles on the board and in these committees remain open. Please contact us if you want to get involved or know someone in the BIPOC community that would be a good fit.

Training

We’re excited to share that we’ve engaged the services of k+r strategies, an Omaha-based “collaborative, majority Black-owned change navigation firm that centers equity and justice”* to help guide us through antiracism, sensitivity, and DE&I training. Founders Katherine MacHolmes and Rachel Grossman will lead us through a workshop designed to reframe our organization, goals, and values so that we can move forward within a solidly antiracist framework. We can’t wait to get started on these months of training, led by local women of color.

Survey

As part of our anti-racism training with k+r, we sent out a survey to all our members to home in on where we need to focus our attention and energy. We truly want to be more representative of our community and become more inclusive in our reach. Your opinions matter and we’ll be looking forward to hearing what you think.

As always, please reach out to us any time with questions or comments.

Sincerely,
The AIGA Nebraska Board of Directors

If you are interested in supporting our local efforts we invite you to be a part of this change.

Contact us at community@nebraska.aiga.org to start a conversation or fill out our Community Feedback form.

In January 2020 we released a brand new event to engage our community at home. Each day designers had a different short exercise with a fun, unique theme to get started creating. Everyone who submitted was entered in daily drawings to win prizes.

Top Prize Winner was Brieanna Kroeger for Submitting All Five Days! Brieanna won a $100 Blick gift card and a free gallery submission to Moonlight.

DAY 1

Emojis

View Gallery

DAY 2

Ticket

View Gallery

DAY 3

4 Letters

View Gallery

DAY 4

TBT

View Gallery

DAY 5

Listen

View Gallery

Check out the Instagram posts from everyone at the hashtag #AIGADesignFlex

We’re Shifting Things Up

We’re continuing our mission to serve the creative community from a digital-first platform for the time being. We have a unique skill set to help us in this…our design thinking.

Join us for our first of many digital events to come!

Kelsey Janda, VP of Design at Hudl will share what it means to work remotely; designing remote, managing remote, and leading remote teams. After surveying the design team, they (the design team) have compiled their data on remote work and will present their findings to us in this Zoom-based event. 

Join us Monday, 3.23.2020 from Noon – 1 pm.
Invite your team too!
 

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT
John Gawley

Creative Community,

In a few weeks, our local leadership was to attend the national conference and leadership retreat. And, like so many other events, Covid-19 happened. Now, we’re presented with a new challenge; continuing our mission to serve the creative community from a digital-first platform for the time being. We have a unique skill set to help us in this…our design thinking.

We’re racking our brains to figure out what that looks like and we want your input. 

What do you want/need from the creative community in this unprecedented time? What concerns you most? How can we help? We put up a quick survey for your voice to be heard. 

Let us know what you think and register for our first virtual Shift+Cmd+Join event, Reuniting Your Team.

Celebrating Nebraska’s Best Visual Design.

We celebrated our 27th annual design competition in November 2019 called SHOW: a juried competition showcasing the best visual design work of the year.

Here’s a Look Back at the Event

OUR JUDGES

OUR SPONSORS

We talked to Michael Stevens, Founder of Filament Design, and creator of this year’s SHOW identity about his creative process and the inspiration for the identity.

Tell us about yourself and your studio Filament.
I got into art and design at a very young age and always loved to draw as a kid. My grandfather was an industrial designer for Parker Pen and Studebaker in the 50s and 60s, so I think somehow the design bug got passed down from him to me. I started off studying painting and drawing in college, but eventually wound up trying some graphic design classes and never looked back.

Filament has been my freelance graphic design practice for over a year now. I really love the freelance life, and I definitely don’t take the flexible schedule and creative freedom for granted. Most of the work I do these days is in the sphere of brand identity, usually with a heavy emphasis on typography and illustration.

What kind of questions do you ask before beginning a design project? Which piece of information is of utmost value?
Wow, that’s really tough! I heard an interview with the film composer Hans Zimmer where he said he approaches every new scoring process convinced he has no idea how to write the music for the story at hand. I’m really inspired by that idea of radical openness at the start of a project. I’ve actually moved away from asking a standard set of questions in favor of just getting to know my clients and collaborators as organically as possible, so it’s different for everyone. When the discussion evolves naturally the most important questions seem to surface on their own.

An image from Michael’s development process.

What was your inspiration for the SHOW identity?
With this year’s identity, I wanted to develop a visual approach all about layeredness and criss-crossing elements. One thing that makes professional design such an interesting career day to day is that the work demands we exist at the center of a really complicated cultural Venn diagram. That idea of intersection and overlap between different ideas, people, and roles was what led to the layered, multicolored typography for this year’s identity.

I also found that because the words AIGA, SHOW, and 2019 are each 4 letters long, there were some interesting possibilities with layering and lining the words one on top of the other in different colors. All of the abstract patterns and colors for the identity (like the hero for the website and the front of the postcard) are actually just close-up crops of the angles and overlapping corners made by the letters in those three words.

Another image from Michael’s process in developing the SHOW identity.

What was your creative process when coming up with the SHOW identity? Or your creative process in general?
Like I said, I try to be wide open to wherever the creative process leads, but the breakthrough with this project was realizing that a monospaced typeface could provide the regularity needed to get AIGA, SHOW, and 2019 to line up when superimposed. From there it was an exploration of overprint-style color effects between those layers, and the realization that the angles within the overlaps could become design elements in themselves when blown up to a large size. Once the idea was off the ground it became obvious that finding a way to animate everything would be an exciting next step (more on that later!)

What were the biggest challenges when working on the SHOW identity?
It was really important that there be unity between the print and digital expressions of the system, and from the beginning we wanted to incorporate an animated element. The biggest challenge has been to create a system that feels like it was made for print, made for web, and made for motion.

Ideas for the poster for the event.

You collaborated with another designer to produce the animations. What is the process like working with a collaborator?
Watching Jase Heuser bring this identity to life has been amazing. We’ve been collaborating on some other projects lately as well, so going into the SHOW identity I already knew he’d do a great job. He’s actually been working remotely on this project, so it’s been fun to go back and forth with the files—it’s really delightful to send off a static design and see it come back completely transformed.

Do you often collaborate with other designers on projects? What makes for a good collaborator?
I do collaborate quite a bit—more and more as I continue to freelance. For me, I think a meaningful collaboration takes not only trust, but also a genuine sense of curiosity and excitement to see where your collaborator might take things next. I think too, it can help to have somewhat different skill sets so each person is offering something unique and there’s plenty of room for the unexpected. In my mind the real power of collaboration isn’t that it allows you to work faster or in higher volume—it’s that it allows you to work in an entirely different way. Finding that perfect balance of overlap vs. diversity of skills is key to that.

Example of SHOW postcard created by Michael.

What is your favorite part of SHOW?
My favorite part of SHOW is seeing the quality of the work itself on opening night. Each year it seems like the work gets better and the bar gets higher. It’s inspiring to see Nebraska’s design community come together in one place and there’s always a lot of energy in the room.

Thank you Michael for your hard work on our Show 2019 branding.

The 2019 Me, Myself and Design (student conference) visuals were created by Kiana Ballinger, a graphic design student from Metropolitan Community College. We sat down with her to discuss her creative process and her experience with AIGA Nebraska.

What was the concept for your poster?
The theme for Me, Myself and Design this year is all about finding your path and figuring out which route you want to take as you grow as a designer. I wanted to portray this on the poster with a map, using different paths and direction to represent a journey. The roads are the process you go through to become a successful designer. I wanted to include icons that you would otherwise find on a road, but also be metaphorical to the theme.

Initial Sketches for the Poster Design

Describe your creative process.
I started the process with simple sketches to narrow down the idea of maps, direction, and paths to represent the journey of designers. I knew from the start that I wanted to include some hand lettering, even though I’ve never integrated it into any of my projects before. It was an opportunity to learn something new. I ultimately came up with three concepts: “Footprints” to represent different paths and direction, “Continents” which has the different design careers such as web, print, UX, etc., and finally, “Map” that is metaphorical to represent the designer’s journey from the start. We ended up combining the hand-lettering from two of the posters with the “Map” concept, but I had to redo the design of the map to integrate it. There was a lot of tweaking to make the poster as best as it can be. I had a hard time coming up with icons that you can find on the road but also fit in with the road names. I chose to write over the copy to give it that “imperfect” and “hand drawn” feeling that the rest of the poster has. One of the bigger challenges I had was keeping the poster to two colors. I didn’t want to lose hierarchy with the information from the poster but keeping it to two colors made the screen-printing process easy.

Iterations of the design as Kiana worked towards the final concept.

Talk about your first screen printing experience. Would you consider this process for future projects?
When Amanda Hoklin invited me to screen print my posters I was beyond thrilled! The Union for Contemporary Art was a great place to have access to the printing equipment and the staff was super friendly and helpful. The process to print was an actual workout (we were sweating) but having two of us made it very easy to make 100+ posters in a few hours. I would definitely consider screen printing for projects because it’s super fun and the end result is priceless.

Kiana working on screenprinting the posters

How has AIGA benefited you as a Student?
Ever since going to AIGA’s Me, Myself & Design event last year, I have gone to every AIGA event after that. It was a game changer for me. I have been exposed to local and national designers and the inspiration it has given me has made me want to push myself and my projects farther than I thought I could. I am a very anxious and quiet person—but by going to events I feel a lot more open to everyone and I find myself wanting to meet new people. I am a lot more confident in my work as a result and I plan to enter into the AIGA show this year!

Me, Myself, & Design 2019
Saturday  | October 12, 2019   | 9a–3:30p

Metropolitan Community College
South Omaha Campus  | ITC Room120
2909 Edward Babe Gomez Ave. Omaha, NE 68107

Register for the Event!