John Maeda Speaks at Creative Mornings Session In TheStar.com’s 2010 article “CEOs Must Be Artists?”, McGill University Professor and artist Nancy Adler spoke of “a tradition of hostility between the arts and commerce,” in which “artists, too often, think of businesspeople as Philistines, and [businesspeople], in turn, think of artists as a bit flaky.” Last Friday […]

Ad for a Selfhelp, a nonprofit organization serving seniors. This ad promotes their senior care management services to bewildered caregivers. Links See more ads. See other work promoting senior care services. See other nonprofit marketing case studies.

The logo is caught in a strange land, somewhere between the mark of a proud craftsman, and our post-modern notion of the brand as the fulfillment of a promise. Like a poem, that can encapsulate an amalgam of image, emotion and metaphor, the logo embodies a dream-like notion between what is and what can be.

This large upside-down image of the Mona Lisa holds some surprises. Modern viewers will have no trouble recognizing the iconic image, though pixelated as it is. We have been accustomed to seeing this famous painting altered, satirized and otherwise copied in so many ways that even the cliché has become banal. However, this interpretation deserves another look. […]

Why don’t nonprofits value intellectual capital, particularly marketing expertise, when it can prove crucial to the success of their cause? I encountered that question when I learned about a nonprofit organization that was planning a campaign to raise $300,000 for food pantries and safety net social services, as well as to engage the community in […]

AIGA’s Smart Models Conference Provides Lessons for Nonprofits Drew Hodges from Spot Design opens the AIGA conference on Smart Business Models by describing how his agency transformed from a design studio creating a posters for Broadway shows, most notably, RENT, into an ad agency to capture the  hundreds of thousands of dollars in media commissions. […]