Atlanta. Day 8.
Went with Jeff to MetroMerge for the morning where we met with Tim Omara (not sure if I have that name right) who is starting an awesome social innovation project in one of THE toughest territories in all of south Atlanta. It was great just to listen to his life story. He and his wife moved into the slums to form relationships with a bunch of the youth there, and they have broken through a dark situation and made so much relational development already. He told stories about gang fights that he’s broken up, as well as just lives that he has helped get out of that scene. One of the ways that he does this is by getting kids in the neighborhood to do community service projects (cleaning up their blocks) and in exchange he gives them a bike. The service projects allow him to build close relationships with the kids, as well as teaching them to work and making their streets a better place. The concept has really caught on and there is a lot of buzz generating about his bike project. So he was meeting with Jeff to talk about turning the project into a non-profit organization. And it was great for me to connect with him because he said that I might be able to come to his neighborhood some days this summer and do community service with some of the other kids.
We met Andre for lunch at Stone’s Soup Kitchen (an awesome downtown diner), and then worked the rest of the day at the house. We put up fliers all around the Village advertising a monstrosity of a garage sale that we’re hosting this Saturday to benefit Gift Card Giver (Jeff called this “grassroots marketing” in a “freelance economy.” He was convinced that this was an important lesson for me to learn: marketing isn’t just sitting at a computer, it’s hard work; I told him he was full of it). Jeff left for a meeting mid-afternoon and I had to meet with a guy from World Vision to move a bunch of furniture (NOT EASY WORK. Bleh..). Tonight, Andre cooked quesadillas, corn, and platanos. She grew up in Bolivia, so we both share a passion for Central-South American foods.
On a different note, I finished a literature design for RIFA in Jackson, TN tonight. You may not care, but it was a huge deal to me, because it’s a pro-bono contract piece I’ve been working on for a while and I really care about their organization. So that felt great to get done. Hopefully it will really help them out!
Design: I worked all day today on the illustrations for the Flash invitations. I used the same principals as I used in the summer tour announcement illustration, so that they followed the same theme. I have been customizing an illustration for every city on the tour by taking a photograph of some landmark or obvious representation of that city (e.g., the Pyramid skyline in Memphis, the AT&T skyline in Nashville, etc.) and manually tracing the image in Illustrator with the pen tool. The result is a cool, technical drawing effect. I got three cities (Tuscaloosa, Memphis, and Nashville) done today, and will hopefully get the rest in the coming week.
