It is with great pleasure that I announce the launch of my latest project, Billboard for the People: A Public Celebration of Progress. Deroy Peraza, over at Hyperakt Design Group had the brilliant idea of channeling all of this positive energy surrounding the election of Barack Obama into a grassroots effort to congratulate our president elect with a massive billboard in New York City.
The idea is pretty simple…
Step 1: We all donate some money over at BillboardForThePeople.com. If you are feeling inspired and generous, and can toss in some serious coin, fantastic! However, even if it’s just a few dollars, every little bit counts.
Step 2: We tell all of our friends about this initiative, and hopefully raise $25,000 by December 15th… Be sure to Digg it, join on FriendConnect and Facebook, etc, to help spread the word.
Step 3: We install a beautiful congratulatory billboard in Manhattan designed by Deroy Peraza, and the good folks over at Hyperakt, just in time for Obama’s inauguration, and welcome him into the White House with style.
After doing so much design work for Web 2.0 start ups, I made this satirical start up investment pitch video about a year ago, but never really pushed it out. Now with the market in the hole, it seemed appropriate that I offer the tech industry a few ideas… Venture Capitalists, feel free to get in touch.
Saturday was the opening of The New Hope exhibit in Geneva, Switzerland, which I had the honor of doing a piece for with Hyperakt Design Group. After gaining international attention for an Obama poster designed by Deroy Peraza at Hyperakt, the studio was asked to do a full series inspired by Obama’s message of hope, to be exhibited at the Flux Laboratory in Geneva. I contributed a Flash-based interactive piece called Kids Vote 2008 which explores kids’ perspectives on the election through an interactive cloud of comments on the two presidential candidates. While the piece is currently being projected at the Flux Laboratory, it can also be experience online at:
I was responsible for the interaction design and front end development of this piece, and with a two week deadline, was left with little time for sleep over the past two weeks. However, with the site live now, and on display in Geneva, all the hard work feels pretty good.
While it is a little too early to hear any direct feedback from the show in Geneva, Kids Vote 2008 has already started to get some attention around the web, with a “Fresh Picks” feature on the website Moluv, a mention on the Communication Arts website, and a blurb on E-Creative.net.
Well it finally came to pass… I re-designed my portfolio and found it necessary to start my own design blog. The formalities really quick: my name is Zeke Shore, I am from Boston MA, I have been an interactive, graphic and motion designer and developer since 2002, and I am currently living in NYC finishing up my studies at Parsons The New School for Design and working as a freelance designer. That was a mouthful. As anyone reading this surly knows, the design blog market is not at all saturated…. so my presence is clearly needed.
This was a multi-fold decision… the first being a pressing need for a vamped up portfolio site that better reflects where I am as a designer (it’s been about five years since the last design went live). While researching other portfolio sites, it became clear that every designer and their intern has a design blog these days. While I am not just ‘jumping on the bandwagon,’ I will concede to being tempted by the shameless self promotion that accompanies the consistent publishing of *hopefully* interesting and useful content. On a more honorable note, I relay on other design blogs every day for everything from news to inspiration to development tutorials, and I am well over due in returning the favor to the design community. Cheers.
