LA sucks for cycling.
Unless you're with the right people.
For me, some of my best cycling experiences were with the Long Beach based GFunk crew.
At night, while most people are getting cozy on a couch while falling asleep in front of the TV, the GFunkers can be found hustling throughout the Long Beach/Los Angeles area.
Bike shorts were optional, fun was mandatory, and egos were best left at home.
This is a poster series I wrote/designed that reflect the attitude and camaraderie of this group.
For Valentine's Day, I made some cards that really capture how people feel around this "holiday." The feeling of needing to have someone for that day—and that day only—because everybody else has someone for that day.
I sold one card.
I've lived in San Francisco a couple of times for work.
And in those quick stints I got the full effect of how terrible the housing crisis is:
A couch in someone else's studio apartment, in the Mission, for $1200/mo.
A tent, with no bathroom, in the backyard of some house the SOMA area for $1400/mo.
Insane.
To add some humor to the situation, I took photos of some of the more ridiculous looking spaces I found in the city and advertised it as "for rent" on Craigslist.
Some people laughed, more so than often, others said they'd do terrible things to my mother because I wasted their time. The people of SF aren't as nice as you'd think.
I spent a year in Wieden+Kennedy's W+K12 program—an experiment disguised as a school disguised as an agency.
For my application I wrote this zine on David Bowie being the definition of "glam."
The director of W+K12 told me that he liked my writing. I guess you can say this was my foray in writing that, in turn, led to me becoming a copywriter.
Working in advertising can be stressful.
That being said, one day I noticed a problem that people in the office were stressed out more than usual.
So, I challenged myself to see if there's a way to create something that can help people alleviate the stresses that come with the advertising lifestyle. I started to think of some of the best stress relievers available.
The answer: Bubble wrap!
I decided to cover the elevator walls with bubble wrap with a message enticing people to release some stress by popping the bubble wrap as they ride the elevators.
After two days time, all the walls were flattened and had to be re-bubble wrapped before they were flattened again another two days later.
People have bad days. Mondays in particular. But the problem is, especially in advertising, people tend to have horrible days: late nights, directors yelling at you, dropping oatmeal on your laptop, etc.
One night I decided to make a traveling book where people can pen their fellow W+Kers a note in hopes of making their day better. Then after reading their note, they can write one themselves and pass it on.
My favorite part is, that in a building of 600+ people, the recipient knows someone out there is thinking of them.
One day, I realized it’s easy to. be anonymous in a "general" SLACK chatroom that consists of 3500+ employees.
So I began. to write a bunch of zany/dumb one-liners and then end them with "Wrong Chat. Sorry."
This left most people wondering what the hell is going on in the office. And, most of all, which chat my response was intended for.
EDIT: After almost two years of this, people finally got curious and went Nancy Drew on me. They discovered this site, found out I'm a copywriter, and (finally) exposed the joke. It was fun while it lasted.
My W+K12 classmate, Eric Swanson, once mentioned that people said he reminded them of the guy on the Tapatío bottle.
With that information, I "edited" the Tapatîo bottles in some of the W+K kitchenettes.
It took a while before people noticed.
Like my insatiable need to make dumb things, I also have an insatiable need to write dumb things.
Since what I write is always rejected by the New Yorker, McSweeny's, and my creative directors, I post them on here (yes, a friggin Tumblr) as well as on my LinkedIn.