BRAINtrust Creative Director featured at gallery exhibition

On Decem­ber 17 we had the oppor­tu­nity to check out a gallery show at the Hol­sum Lofts in the Las Vegas Arts Dis­trict that fea­tured the design art of BRAIN­trust Marketing’s Cre­ative Direc­tor Travis Neil­son and a hand­ful of other designers.

“Impres­sion” was an exclu­sive one-night show­ing of the art­work of some of the hottest artists and design­ers in the area, and was pre­sented by Wen­doh Media (pub­lish­ers of 944 Mag­a­zine), Frazee Paint, UBC Enter­prises, going green, M3 and Skyler Custer & Chris­t­ian Sagum.

Full dis­clo­sure:  Travis has anchored our agency’s cre­ative team since the divi­sion was cre­ated, so I’m some­what biased.  Nonethe­less, I was very proud that his work was among the best at the exhi­bi­tion. (And by “among” I mean, hands down the best, most pro­fes­sional, styl­ish and emo­tion­ally evocative.)

A high­light was his typo­graph­i­cal art­work “159 Indi­vid­u­als Share Their Thoughts on Life,” a com­pelling com­pendium of (you guessed it) words of life wis­dom from 159 dif­fer­ent peo­ple all culled from Travis’ on-line social net­works on Face­book, Twit­ter, Behance, Orkut, etc.  Laid out in a thought­ful and engag­ing fash­ion, I thought the piece rep­re­sented an inter­est­ing and com­pletely fresh take on mixed media art.  While artists often mix sculp­ture and oils, or pho­to­graph, light and sound for mixed media instal­la­tions, Travis pushed the mixed media con­cept to blend the new and largely ethe­real realm of online social media into a graphic design piece that was tan­gi­ble and sin­gu­lar but with a strong sense of the new global community.

In addi­tion Travis dis­played his hand-carved wooden amper­sand, a self-published font book (an homage to typog­ra­phy giants Hoe­fler & Frere Jones) and an arti­sanal mini-portfolio enti­tled “In Sight, Insight, Incite.”  This beau­ti­ful hand­crafted brochure was a piece that was – in part – respon­si­ble for land­ing Travis his posi­tion at BRAIN­trust Marketing.

After the gallery show, I thought about what sep­a­rated Travis’ work from the other artists.  Was I sim­ply pre­dis­posed to the work of a col­league over that of strangers?  No, I decided.  In addi­tion to the pieces on dis­play that night, design­ers’ port­fo­lios and resumes reg­u­larly cross my desk, so I feel some­what jus­ti­fied to offer my layman’s opin­ion as to why Travis’ design work is excellent:

• Art (and espe­cially com­mer­cial art) is a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  Travis under­stands this, and designs with the goal to – above all else – deliver the appro­pri­ate mes­sage loud and clear.

• Design is both an art and a craft.  Travis is a truly a stu­dent of his craft.  Every font, every image, every color and every line is cho­sen and exe­cuted with a spe­cific pur­pose and pre­ci­sion.  While some design­ers make their design deci­sions with a shrug or what they think “looks cool,” Travis dri­ves his design with both form and func­tion in mind.  “That color gra­di­ent is meant to take your eye from point A to point B,” he will say.  Or, “I used that font because it com­ple­ments their logo, but doesn’t com­pete with it.”  Or “I did a three, five, three col­umn grids on these pages because it keeps every­thing with prime num­bers.”  (Yeah, I didn’t know what that meant either, but it looked great.)

• Pas­sion meets pro­fes­sion­al­ism.   So much of the art on dis­play that evening smacked of youth­ful pas­sion.  Over­done with stock Pho­to­shop effects, drip­ping with unread­able font treat­ments, marred with shock-value pro­fan­ity; Travis, on the other hand, brings a pro­fes­sional matu­rity to his work but still attacks design with a pas­sion. Exam­ple?  Hey, have you ever watched a two-hour doc­u­men­tary about the font Hel­vetica?  Travis has, mul­ti­ple times, and he described it with such zest that he con­vinced me to watch it too.

Travis has deliv­ered award-winning designs that have been rec­og­nized by the Amer­i­can Adver­tis­ing Fed­er­a­tion, the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Busi­ness Com­mu­ni­ca­tors, the Asso­ci­a­tion of Mar­ket­ing and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Pro­fes­sion­als and oth­ers; his work has been fea­tured in national mag­a­zines, text­books and cre­ative design indus­try web­sites.  But we were espe­cially proud that Travis was selected to take part in this gallery show for his non-commercial design art.

I could con­tinue about how tal­ented our cre­ative direc­tor is, but I have to wrap up this post now.  Travis just walked into my office… and I fear he’s going to ask for a raise…

Michael Cold­well is Man­ag­ing Part­ner at BRAIN­trust Mar­ket­ing + Communications

Fol­low him on Twit­ter @coldwellm