While we were home for a family event last week, I found out something amazing. My grandma's cousin, Jerry Meyer, told us all about his days of being a graphic designer. He spent 25 years as a designer in London and New York. His claim to fame was that he designed the original Dunkin' Donuts logo. Currently he resides in Minneapolis and is retired as a designer. As he was leaving that job, he took with him the original artwork from the job jacket, rescuing it from being filed away in a storage facility. Now that I know him, I hope to talk more and find out what else he did, look for more posts in the future.

A few weeks ago, Colle+McVoy was invited to join in something called PhizzPop which is a 72 hour design challenge sponsored by Microsoft to promote their newest interactive software. In a lot of ways it was the very nerdy version of Project Runway. After 3 long days in training, we were given a challenge to figure out interactive solutions for a retailer to help retain more customers when people are spending less money. We focused on the shopping list with extensions from the website to mobile to social networks and an in-store experience on the Surface table that brought many things that are great about online shopping to the store. In the end Zeus Jones won with a strategy that rethought the problem to be a "retailer of retailers". Also, Space 150 brought a great design feel to extensions from the store to home. In the end it was a great event and a fun opportunity.