Alison Garnett

Alison Garnett, January 27th 2012, Creative Director at Critical Mass

ABOUT ALLISON

alisongarnett.com

mylalaland.com

• Her online name is "SuperCapacity" which is based on a large format washing machine as an analogy to her work habits where she takes on more than she can handle, but it always gets done. Check out her way cool business cards, that can withstand the heaviest of duty washing machines
• Allison has 3 dogs, 2 kids and a husband and says that family is the most important aspect of her life
• She graduated her undergrad at OCAD for Drawing and Painting, then spent a year in Florence painting
• In 1994 she came to Sheridan for the Media program on her parents recommendations
• After graduating Sheridan she worked on CD ROM's and Macromedia Director
• Alison landed a job at ICE where her career in the digital arts began
• She worked at ICE doing digital media, then worked freelance design for a bit, joined Henderson Bas, created her own company called SuperCapacity, went to Taxi for six years and has recently joined the Critical Mass team as a creative director.
• At ICE she taught herself how web sites were put together by copy and pasting code
• As a freelancer she worked on web work because that is what she wanted to do, which led her to work at HB to work on large projects for Molson, Levi's and Nike. Working on these big brands really advanced her career so after she adopted her baby she could have a successful business.
• At Taxi she worked for six years on great brands like Mini, Town Shoes, LCBO, Cadillac Fairview, Taxi Cafe and Telus.

CRITICAL MASS

• At Taxi Allison was known as a 'hybrid' because she is good at print, web , photography and packaging
• She left Taxi because she felt she was a little bit too comfortable and wanted to work on big sites, not just micro-sites

THEODORE ALEXANDRE

View work here

• This was a great site for Allison to start working on because it was a massive e-commerce site, with over 4000 pieces of furniture to sell
• They re-hauled the branding and she convinced the company to re photograph all their furniture to work with the brand and work visually with their strategy, this was a tough sell because for each piece they had to have multiple shots of each piece and had to retouch and style each individual photo
• They wanted to treat the furniture like a Rolex watch and they definitely achieved the luxury and elegance of that

SEARS

Check out the work here

• This was a challenging project because Sears did not have the budget to do a complete rework of their site, so they had to go one department at a time
• They could only re-skin the site, so this was a massive I.A. exercise, and had to do a lot of research as to what people look for and buy the most

BRITA

• The site was almost a micro site feel, and works to remind you to change your filter
• The neat part of this site was as you scroll down further and further the colour changes as if your getting deeper and deeper into the water backdrop.

ADVICE FROM ALLISON

• It's not just about the work you do at the office, it's about doing creative things outside of work
• Design identities, mini company sites, pro-bono work, business cards and you will get ahead and your work in the office will show it
• Work on contests, because you might just win and get to work on the project, it's good PR for your company too.
• Don't be afraid to ask for peoples business cards
• It's just advertising - we don't save lives, we just make cool shit