We Art Nashville

On Friday, May 21, Joel joined our friends at The Arts Company for a special ceremony to present Mayor Karl Dean with the first two (1/100) Spirit of Nashville flood posters. The event was a benefit for Nashville flood relief and included many other neighboring galleries. The money raised from $10 wristbands, 10% discounts, and $35 Spirit of Nashville posters went straight to the Community Foundation. It was a great night! (To see more photos from the event, check out The Arts Company's Facebook page.)

These posters, which have raised over $24,000 for Nashville flood relief, have been a huge success.We sold over 800 posters in one week. Drop by or call us today if you want one before it's too late!

NEW Spirit of Nashville Flood Relief Posters

ADG teamed up with McQuiddy Classic Printing and Athens Paper to produce 2 limited edition prints that celebrate Nashville’s incredible strength, generosity and sense of community during the recent devastating floods and recovery efforts. Spirit of Nashville will sell the prints online to raise money for flood relief. 100% of the profits will go directly to Samaritan’s Purse and the Red Cross. The prints will be available on Monday, May 17, 2010, but you can pre-order them now.

We will produce a limited edition of 500 prints of each design. The prints will sell for $30 each. For every sale, $30 will be donated directly to the relief agencies. For online orders, shipping will be added to the price, unless the purchaser wishes to pick up the print in person at our studio store.

One poster is titled “Spirit of Nashville” and features two hands joined in lifting a guitar out of the water with the words “Spirit of Nashville: Courage, Hope, Strength, Pride, Generosity” running across the state Flag of Tennessee. The other poster titled “Play On” features a female musician performing in a spotlight. The design was originally created by Matt Lehman when he was one of our staff designers. The woman was on stage in the original design, but in this new version, Joel revised the art by adding flood waters covering the stage, with one of Music City’s new motivational themes: “PLAY ON.”

To see all the various Nashville flood relief posters produced by other designers, check out Collide Creative's blog.

Nashville Under Water...

Anderson Design Group and Spirit of Nashville were very blessed to have not been affected by the terrible floods that did so much damage to Music City last weekend. For that we are very grateful. Thanks to all of our out of town clients and friends who have asked how we are doing. We know many people who were not as fortunate—we will be lending a had to help folks clean up the mess this weekend. And over the next few months, we want to help flood victims in two other small ways:

1. If you own a Spirit of Nashville print that was ruined in the flood, you may bring the water-damaged print to our studio and we will replace it for free. (Sorry, we cannot replace the frame, but we will be happy to replace your flood damaged prints between now and June 30th, 2010. Some designs are no longer in print, so we may need to replace an out-of-print design with another design of your choice.)

2. If you have a friend whose home was flooded, we would like to give them one free print as a house-warming gift, once their home is restored. It may take several months for folks to clean up and get their walls ready for art again. And we realize that art is the last thing on everyone’s mind right now. But a Spirit of Nashville print is a wonderful finishing touch for any home. It’s also a great gift to give to a friend who has been through a hard time. To take advantage on this offer, please bring a photo of your friend’s damaged home. We will give you a free note card & envelope to write an encouraging word for your friend, too. (One free print per customer, please.)

Olive & Sinclair -- Good as GOLD!

Anderson Design Group was honored to take home a GOLD Award for the packaging category of the AIGA Tenn Show Awards on Friday, April 30th. Tenn Show, the state’s most prestigious juried design competition, was open to professionals and students throughout Tennessee involved in designing visual and creative communications in print, motion graphics, packaging and seven other categories. Mayor of Nashville, Karl Dean, gave a presentation during the event about art and community advocacy. Over 200 AIGA members and non-members participated and their work was judged by a panel of creative professionals from each Tennessee AIGA chapter. Only one GOLD Award was given for each category.

Much like the recent ADDY Awards, our Olive & Sinclair Chocolate bar packaging design caught the judges’ eyes. We can swear on the Bible that they were not bribed with delicious chocolate—(that’s because we ate it all ourselves! Then we stuck cardboard inside the wrapper and made dummy bars before we sent in our entries.) Anyway, this packaging seems to be doing its job. Olive & Sinclair Chocolate sales continue to increase, and people continue to buy the chocolate and save the labels!

Where We Work featured on FastCompany.com

Fast Company posted a nice review of Where We Work, a book we designed last fall. Read it here.

Dollar General Art

Dollar General Corporation has a beautiful corporate headquarters in Goodlettsville, TN. In the fall of 2009, they called to ask us to create 4 pieces of art that would commemorate a very special event. But it was secret—(they were bound by federal law to keep a lid on the details.) It was pretty obvious that there was a public stock offering in the works, but nobody was allowed to talk about it. So they said, “We have a long tradition of collecting original art for our corporate offices and spaces. Do something that celebrates our history and our brand, and make the art contemporary enough that it will suggest where we are headed into the future.” They wanted real paintings—4 Joel Anderson originals.

So Joel took a tour of the corporate facilities and the extensive fine art collection that the Turner family had amassed over the years. It was rather intimidating to know that he had to create 3 giant paintings to be the focal point of the lobby, and do a fourth piece that would grace the executive level board room. Oh yes, one of the pieces had to be turned into a signed and numbered limited edition print for 60 VIPs. A version of the art needed to be blown up big enough to hang as a 2-story tall banner out front of the building, too.



So Joel set to work on the art. He started with sketches, then vector designs in Adobe Illustrator. Then he bought 6 foot tall canvases, projected his art onto them and started painting. To add a dimensional effect, he cut up a mosaic of painted paper strips and affixed them to the canvas. The resulting works are the focal point of the grand lobby. Limited edition prints were given to corporate executives, Wall Street investors, clients and traders in recognition of their work to make the public stock offering a success.

This project was an interesting fusion of fine art and graphic design—of corporate America supporting the arts while using art to promote a corporate vision.

Our Retail Store

What does a design firm do when the sluggish economy forces clients to cut back and spend less? We crank up a studio store and create cool stuff to sell to the general public! One nice thing about downsizing is getting more free space to do creative things (like turning your conference area into a retail boutique!) Since we have extra space in our building, and we have created a plethora of cool prints & gifts, retail seemed like an easy way to “make lemonade out of economic lemons.” Retail is actually fun—we have enjoyed talking to people who walk in off the street to browse and shop our Spirit of Nashville and Art & Soul of America creations. In between creating logos, brochures, book covers, etc., we find ourselves chatting it up with folks who are looking for art to decorate homes and offices. Or advising shoppers as to the perfect gift for co-workers, parents, graduating kids, friends or lovers! That’s the cool thing about design—you can sell your art on everything from note cards, posters, and tote bags to t-shirts, mugs and magnets.

Anyway, most folks don’t know we have a retail store inside our design firm, so we printed some of our most popular designs onto metal signs and mounted them to the outside of our building. Now everyone who drives by can see the place where all of those Nashville prints come from. Only problem is, retail customers expect us to be open during retail hours! So we are looking into how we can keep the studio store open past 5:00 and on Saturday.