Hi all -

We’re thrilled to be working as a sub-contractor to fellow Baltimore design firm Novak Birch for one of our dream clients: The Peace Corps. The contract is for print design work on collateral materials that will be used to further the Peace Corps recruitment campaign “Life is Calling. How Far Will You Go?” Our design work will create a visual brand framework that can then be applied to new and existing recruitment materials.

The Peace Corps has helped 139 countries around the world with issues ranging from AIDS education to communication/information technology to clean water.

Building awareness for Peace Corps, driving interest to their website and recruiters, and generating applications is accomplished in large part through collateral material that recruiters use.

We’re proud to be designing Peace Corps recruitment materials and look forward to sharing our work on this site. Stay tuned!

Garret Ohm
Marketing Director
Orange Element

Last night was a blast. Not only did Orange Element take home 5 Addys, including two Gold Addys, we also found out that one of our entries, Matt Mendelsohn promotional kit, won another Gold at the AAF District 2 competition! This means that it will automatically move on to the National competition!

We had a ton of fun last night - both at the show and at the after party at Lemongrass in Baltimore. Here are some pictures of our crew. Enjoy!

Happy Monday everyone. I hope you all had a great Easter weekend. I meant to write about this on Friday, but it was a late development and I didn’t have time to write before I left for Pennsylvania. We’re really excited to announce that we have been chosen by the Maryland Film Festival to help promote their Friends of the Festival program.

We started talking to them a couple of months ago because while we love our clients like Citifinancial, Comcast, T.Rowe Price and W.R. Grace, we enjoy taking a periodic break from working on corporate accounts to work for those that are typically non-traditional and edgy. Luckily they thought Orange Element was worthy to work with them.

In talking with the folks over there, we quickly realized that one of the most pressing sore spots for them was their Friends of the Festival program. While the Festival itself gets lots of attention in early May due to amazing programming and celebrity involvement, the organization has struggled to communicate to the general public that the Maryland Film Festival is actually way more than just one event. It’s actually year-round events, film screenings, contests, and more, with one amazing flagship event each year.

Years ago, in an attempt to communicate this, they adapted a revised logo for the Maryland Film Festival incorporating the number 365, which you can see to the left. It was a bandaid at best, but I had to admit to them that I didn’t immediately get what it was trying to communicate (of course I did get it when I had the luxury of meeting with them a couple of times). In addition, the Friends of the Festival program was buried well within the Web site, nearly invisible to interested parties. Needless to say the program was crawling ahead at best.

Enter Orange Element. We are going to start by creating a unique identity for the Friends of the Festival program that will be able to stand on its own and begin to be promoted when it just doesn’t make sense to promote the festival itself. We think this approach will be the best way to communicate the breadth of Maryland Film Festival’s offerings while still building the brand’s offerings. In a sense, we’re hoping to create more of a ‘community’ around the Maryland film industry by promoting the FoF brand.

Once we create the identity, we’re going to use it in creating sweet membership cards for members (…think Amex black cards..), email campaigns, posters, t-shirts, social networking sites, etc. We have lots of cool stuff planned to try to bolster the numbers for the program and we’re sure they will be successful.

One of the most fun and exciting elements of our work for them will be promoting the renovated program during the Festival itself. We’re going to go tour the Charles Theater this week sometime to see how we can incorporate environmental graphics to make sure that people at the Festival take notice. We’re going to try to incorporate light gel stencils and projection equipment, as well as some movie-style posters. It promises to be good stuff.

Well, that’s it for now - See you at the show on May 1-4th!

Garret Ohm
www.orange-element.com

Bowie, Maryland is the state’s 5th largest city. It also happens to be one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the region, thanks to the efforts of the members of the forward-thinking local government. To this point, unfortunately, the public just wasn’t aware of all of the great things that Bowie has been doing in the way of sustainability.

We’re about to change that. Today marks the day we get started with our work for the City of Bowie to increase awareness and participation in their “Green” efforts. Our work begins by creating an identity for the entire green program, dubbed “Clean Bowie.”

Meant as both an adjective to describe the results of the efforts, as well as a call to action for the public, Clean Bowie will represent all of the efforts contained in the City’s Environmental Infrastructure Action Strategy Plan (EIASP - link will open a PDF) that the government put into place in 2007 and puts into full swing in 2008. Contained in this EIASP are strategies to contain pollution, decrease the City’s carbon footprint, involve the public and adjust infrastructure to be more eco-friendly.

It really is a forward-thinking plan that they have put together. I’ve read the entire thing and was very impressed at what they’ve put together. We’re excited to create the identity for the Clean Bowie program and help them to generate awareness around it. While our work starts with the identity component, it won’t stop there. Our plans are to implement this identity into a Web site (to replace their current “Green Page”) that will involve the public, direct mail to inform the public, guerilla tactics includin bumper stickers, and outdoor advertising components.

We look forward to this work as it definitely fits in very well with this design + communications firm’s modus operandi. We embrace sustainability and strive to integrate solutions that will achieve our clients’ goals while leaving the smallest footprint possible.

Have a great rest of the day.

Garret Ohm
www.orange-element.com

Hi everyone, happy Friday (at this point, almost Saturday). We just left the office of our good friends and Web partners Fastspot, after reviewing the logo concepts we developed for them and the Orange Element Web concept that they’ve developed for us. I can honestly say that both the logo and the Web site are going to be incredible. It will probably be several months before our new site is launched, but when it is….watch out!

This week was crazy at Orange Element. We’ve got lots of fun new projects going on and a few really good opportunities in the works. I’ll keep you posted on that as we hear more, but the first half of 2008 is shaping up to be a REALLY busy one. After the stressful week, it’s nice to be sitting here on Friday night from the comfort of my leather recliner. I hope everyone has a great weekend.

In the meantime, check out Fastspot’s demo reel - it’s pretty awesome. Nice work, guys, and thanks for a great meeting today. We’re onto something big!

Garret Ohm
www.orange-element.com

We did!! We were notified today by the Advertising Association of Baltimore that Orange Element has received five Addy awards for their work in 2007! That makes two years straight that we won five awards. Not bad, eh?

Garret Ohm
www.orange-element.com