I’m so excited that one of my favorite bands Blind Pilot are playing this Thursday at Charlotte’s Neighborhood Theater in NoDa. Check out the Portland-based indie folk band’s 3 Rounds and a Sound played live from the 7th Ward in New Orleans via @Liveset. This song is the most played in my iTunes library and will send shivers down your spine. These guys are amazingly talented!
Make Positive Change Poster for AIGA’s Get Out the Vote Campaign & our upcoming AIGA Charlotte Get Out the Vote Pop Up Show on June 14!
Hand lettering type
Let’s Do Lunch and Design for a More Sustainable World.
This is another bittersweet event for me coming up this Friday, June 1, 2012. It will be the last Eat Your Greens that I’ll be hosting as the VP of Sustainability for AIGA Charlotte. At the end of June I’ll be rolling off the executive board which I have served on for the past 5 years and into an Advisory Board position. Here are the details for the event below which I’m very excited about. It’s a fairly new public market in Charlotte supporting local and sustainable food. Hope to see you out there!
Join AIGA Charlotte for lunch at 7th Street Public Market with fellow environmentally-conscious designers. Starting at 11:45 am, we’ll take a tour of the new city market where we’ll learn about its mission, the layout and unique local vendors from Jacqueline Venner Senske, Operations Manager. The tour will be followed with lunch from the newly opened Pure Pizza which is Charlotte’s only farm-to-fork pizzeria, boasting locally grown and organic ingredients. We’ll end at the market’s Farm Stand where attendees can pick up some fresh, local and delicious produce to take back to our studios and make all of our colleagues jealous that they didn’t attend. This will be a casual lunch to meet other like-minded creatives, enjoy farm-to-fork eats and discuss Charlotte’s local food system. Come out and join us!
Parking
Validated parking is available in the 7th Street Station parking deck adjacent to the market. Just bring your ticket in with you and we’ll get it validated in the market before you leave.
RSVP
This event is FREE for members and non-members but you must RSVP to attend. Each attendee will be responsible to purchase his/her own lunch.
About Eat Your Greens
Eat Your Greens is a quarterly lunch event series held at a local organic / farm-to-table restaurant with a discussion for designers, marketers, communicators and creatives of all levels and backgrounds to exchange ideas and talk about being more sustainable and socially responsible in Charlotte’s ever-growing city. Topics change quarterly and range from how to engage clients into the fabric of creating sustainable design solutions, field trips to discuss ‘cradle to cradle’ concepts to idea and information sharing for sustainable processes, communications, resources and practices.
Can’t wait! @AIGAConference GAIN: Design for Social Value Conference Oct 9-10 in SF (Taken with instagram)
Yummy VivaRaw Green Clean: kale, celery, cucumber, parsley, apple & lemon along with other raw juices available at 7th Street Public Market.
Join us this Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 6:30pm for one of the largest and most fun AIGA Charlotte events of the year! Our AIGA Charlotte State of the Union Annual Meeting will give an overview of what has happened in our chapter and new initiatives, we’ll have an awesome array of designery swag to bid on for our Silent Auction and best of all, you’ll get to meet the President of AIGA, Doug Powell, who’ll talk about Designing for Social Change and Design for Good. More details visit aigacharlotte.org
If you live in North Carolina, on May 8, you will have the opportunity to vote against Amendment One. Why should you? Because it’s a completely horrific and utterly unethical amendment to North Carolina’s constitution. It’s backwards, poorly written and has very harmful unintended consequences. To find out more about it, visit protectncfamilies.org and make sure to get out and vote!
Vote Against Amendment One PDF Download
Are you a leader in Charlotte’s design community? If so, our 2012 AIGA Charlotte Board Nominations are happening right now and we want you! Check out the latest post at AIGA Charlotte below.
So, you attend AIGA Charlotte events pretty regularly. You’ve volunteered a couple times to help out. You may even be involved as a mentor in our Mentor program. If you are still looking to make more of a difference in the Charlotte design community and be more involved in our chapter, AIGA…
Source: aigacharlotte
Perfect timing! Our CSA has just started up again and we got our new composter a few weeks ago. We are working on being a zero waste live/work studio and did extensive research on the best way to reduce our biodegradable leftovers. Nature Mill’s automatic composter is the perfect fit for us above the plain compost bins, tumblers and worm factories we looked at. Check out the video above. It’s very cool! (And yes, I did just write that a composter is cool. This one really is.)
This week’s Know Your Farms CSA including green and red lettuce from Barbee Farms
Be on the lookout for the new Know Your Farms truck, signs and brochures we designed that are rolling out in Charlotte this week for the launch of their Spring CSA!
Know Your Farms has an excellent Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program resourcing produce, meats, eggs and dairy from a variety of farms within 100-mile radius of Charlotte. We’ve been a part of a few CSAs and this one is hands down the best one around! (And we’re not just saying that because they’re our client and we love all that they do. We’ve actually been part of their CSA long before that.)
Know Your Farms mission is to lead the transformation of Charlotte’s local food system toward a future that provides farmers a stable revenue stream throughout the year and consumers access to the highest quality and freshest local food. Not only do they run a multi-farm year-round CSA to help in these efforts but they also have a workplace wellness program, on-farm work projects, farm tours, source local food for events and restaurants and they speak on local food and farmland preservation.
We’re avid supporters of shopping and eating local because it fosters community and economic growth by circulating our dollars within the region. It helps conserve the land, enriches the soil, protects our air and water quality and minimizes energy consumption. Know Your Farms helps us with this effort by connecting us with our farmers, fresh food and makes eating seasonally and locally effortless.
We’re working on a new website for them but in the meantime you can check out more information on their current site at knowyourfarms.com and sign up for a CSA today!
Don’t live around Charlotte? No worries, you can locate farmers markets, farm stands and CSAs anywhere in the U.S. at localharvest.org
This past Saturday, March 31, 2012 was bittersweet for me. I had the honor of attending Sustain Charlotte’s First Annual Sustainability Awards where I was a nominee for Overall Outstanding Leader among Charlotte’s top sustainability figures. It was also my last official day as the Green Drinks Charlotte Creative Director.
I did not win a Sustainability Award (nor did I anticipate to do so) but I was excited to be alongside 150+ wonderful peers who are creating positive change for Charlotte. A list of the nominees can be found online at the Charlotte Business Journal and a big congratulations to all of the winners below!
Sustain Charlotte’s First Annual Sustainability Award Winners
Outstanding Contribution to Local Sustainability in:
Air Quality - June Blotnick, Clean Air Carolina
Buildings and Homes - Nicole Venezia, City of Charlotte
Economy - Amanda Breeden, Michael Scott Mater Foundation
Energy - Brian Kasher, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
Food - Robin Emmons, Sow Much Good
Parks and Green Space - Ann Browning, Carolina Thread Trail
Social Equity - Tracy Russ, Crossroads Charlotte
Transportation - Martin Zimmerman, Charlotte Area Bicycle Alliance
Waste Reduction - Michael Talbert, Mecklenburg County
Water Quality - David Merryman, Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation
Outstanding Educator - Helene Hilger, UNC Charlotte
Outstanding Overall Leader - Dan Roselli, Packard Place
As for Green Drinks Charlotte, I will be moving over to an Advisory Board position. I’ll still be involved with the great networking organization, just in a less time consuming capacity. Since I run my own business along with being an Editorial Director for The Living Principles, Vice President of Sustainability for AIGA Charlotte, Advisory Board for CPCC’s Advertising + Graphic Design Department and so on… I had to change my role to better serve Green Drinks. I had such a fulfilling 3+ year stretch with helping to create and mold what Green Drinks Charlotte is today including the branding, design, communication materials, overall messaging and monthly events. I’m happy to leave the organization in very good hands with our Ambassador of Eco (President): Amber Coffman, Membership Coordinator: Bryan Gabriel; Photography Coordinator: Virginia Faircloth and new board member Brent Levi. Thursday, April 12, 2012 is our next Green Drinks Charlotte monthly event at a new location - Harvest Moon Grille where we’ll have local apps, drinks and the above Sustainability Award winner for Air Quality - June Blotnick from Clean Air Carolina! Check out greendrinksclt.com for more information. We hope to see you out there!
Onward and upward!
For many who know me, I’m a pretty organized person (a little OCD in fact). I just like things a certain way and know if things are organized, it helps me be so much more efficient. Well, I’ve got a dirty secret, most of my studio is pretty tidy except for one area, my “hoarders-like” closet! My design studio gets so busy with work that I simply put things I don’t have a place for in there. After a few years, it’s run amuck and I knew that now adding in a letterpress print studio to the mix, I’d have to get organized. This past weekend I did just that. I stocked up on some white boxes and Voilà! an organized closet that I can even keep the door open and admire from my desk. It was a lot of hard work cleaning and purging but I feel so refreshed and ready to print now on my new C&P Pilot press, knowing that everything has a home and a place!
New addition to our family: Welcome home to our C&P Pilot Press! Now just to name her… (Taken with instagram)
