Get Involved! (NOW)
November 17th, 2008 @ 5:38 pm
Hey everyone, hope your semesters are all going well! I’m excited to finally have the AIGA blog up and running and I hope everyone to takes part in it by posting or at the very least checking it out a few times a week. Go ahead and bookmark it, or go really bold and stick it on your toolbar, you know you want to.
Anyway I thought I’d clear up some information that some people might have been wondering about AIGA this semester. I like lists, so we’ll stick with that:
WHAT WE HAVE ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED:
- Helped Ben Hannam to raise prize money for this year’s 2-minute Film Festival. The Armory announced that they will donate $900 for 1st place. Exemplum has donated $300 for the 3rd place prize. We are currently speaking to a few design agencies in the area to see if we can get a co-sponsorship for the Judges Choice (also $900); and we are actively seeking one more donation of $600 for 2nd place.
- We carried out a large-scale graphics campaign for LGBTA’s AIDS Awareness Week 2008. This involved creating two banners (one for Squires and one for War Memorial Hall), 8.5×11 Flyers, Invitations sent to faculty and staff, CT inserts, table cards for the dining halls, and more. They were very pleased with our execution and asked if we would want to help them with future events in the Spring.
- We designed “Get Out The Vote” posters and had the top three submissions printed and placed around Blacksburg. Darin from the print shop kindly donated prints in order for us to do this. I had help from Mike Payne and Jessica Harllee placing them around town and everyone seemed thrilled to have us put them in their window. I got a lot of “wow these are good!” They were very well executed and they stood out amongst all the other posters.
WHAT WE PLAN TO ACCOMPLISH:
- AIDS Awareness Week is not over yet! If you have any skills with Adobe After Effects, Premier, Flash, or even iMovie we need your help. We are currently trying to put together a short animated promotion for the week that will be playing on a wide-screen HD TV in squires.
- T-Shirts to sell. We are looking for design submissions. These can be just for AIGA to buy or targeted at the larger VT student body as a whole (think football). You can post your designs here to the blog!
MEMBERSHIP:
- You do NOT have to be a paying member of AIGA to participate in our student group. You can still come to the meetings, contribute thoughts and ideas, designs, and anything else you would like.
- That being said, an official student membership with AIGA costs $75, a huge discount off the professional price (somewhere upwards of $300 I believe). With that membership you receive job listings from all over the country (these are legit jobs at awesome design agencies), a place to post your portfolio and resume, a great place to network, discounts on local and national design events, and more.
- To be considered an official student chapter with AIGA we must have at least 10 paying members from Virginia Tech at all times.
MEETINGS:
- Meetings dates and times are determined at the beginning of each semester by talking to students in various VCD classes and sometimes with the aid of an online survey
- It’s impossible to have meetings that fit everyone’s schedule, but we try our hardest to make the times reasonable for most. If it looks like a meeting time will not be reasonable, it will be cancelled and moved accordingly.
- For Fall Semester 2008, the official meetings are every other Tuesday at 5:30 in VCD. I send reminders through email to the AIGA listserv and I’ll also be posting them on here from now on.
- Meetings rarely last more than 45 minutes and mostly depend on the workload of the group.
- Meetings are held in order to socialize with one another, keep in touch, critique work, and suggest ideas for events and projects that we would like to participate in as a group.
- Meetings are not meant to be boring, awkward, a waste-of-time, or any other version of those descriptions. They can be as ridiculous and fun as you want them to be. If you all request to have free pizza at a meeting, we can do that. We can watch movies, meet at a restaurant or someone’s house, screenprint, design things, whatever you think would make for a good time. The problem is that I can’t plan a meeting like that unless I know there will be people who want to attend, so speak up!
So that’s all I can think of for now but if there are any other questions just post a comment and I’ll get back to you. Enjoy the break, I know I will.
