We hope you’ve all had a happy and rejuvenating holiday break. Here at AIGA Portland, we’ve been gearing up for the New Year — and we want to tell you all about it!

As our chapter works to collaborate with, support, and elevate the design community in Portland, we’re making a few changes to our programming calendar. We’ll be including a series of new events and initiatives. In addition, we are continuing to revamp our communications locally as well as offer you the best content out of AIGA National.

Last year, our Programming team went all out to bring some of the world’s leading design talent to Portland. This year will be no different as we kick off two solid days of typography inspired events for Design Week Portland at PNCA. On day one we’ll be holding an Adobe workshop during the day and later hosting lettering artist and designer Dana Tanamachi. On day two Timothy Goodman will be joining us for  Sharpie Art Workshop, followed by an evening speaking engagement. And this is just the DWPDX lineup. Stay tuned for more to come throughout the year.

Our regular programming will see some changes, one of which will be a calendar update to our longest running event series, dMob. With so many social networking events going on in Portland, we’ve decided to switch the dMob cadence from once a month to once every other month. This will include more interactive opportunities as well. We love getting together with our Portland Design Mob, and look forward to making it even more engaging in its next ten years. Our upcoming dMob will take place on February 10th.

The revamping of Career Tools and our partnership with 52 Limited was a huge success last year. We can’t wait to bring you more tips, tricks, design and business education, as well as endless inspiration in 2016. Look out for this quarterly breakfast continuing in February.

Digital Dialogues has been a quarterly event series for four years running. With the ever-changing landscape of digital design and app creation, we decided to end this series with a bang in 2015 with Second Story. Thank you to all of those that participated in and attended Digital Dialogues over the years. We had a blast and we learned a great deal through this intimate exploration of various case studies.

With the departure of Digital Dialogues come two new regular events—our quarterly Women in Design series and Member Meet Ups. We launched our Women in Design series with a sold out pop-up shop last year. This year we continue with a panel discussion on Women’s Leadership, in participation with Women’s History Month. Leading up to the event, we will also be posting a series of blog interviews with inspiring women in the design industry.

Member Meet Ups is another new series, for AIGA members only. This will be your opportunity to meet other members, learn more about the organization, other chapters, national news, member benefits, and ask questions, all while participating in different activities and field trips. Stay tuned for our first Member Meet Up to launch in February.

Now that you have the lowdown on our events, let’s talk communications. In December we launched a website for volunteer applicants to support our growing team. It has been a huge success, and we are still in the process of accepting applications—apply today! This new team will allow us to bring you improved and more collaborative blog content, targeted social media, and more robust design.

And finally, we will be launching a new and improved website in the coming weeks. Phase One will include an extended calendar so you’ll never miss an event, a more robust blog platform with hi-res images, a shared feed with AIGA national so you’ll always be abreast of the latest news, as well as a spotlight to showcase our members. If you are an AIGA member, now is a great time to update your headshot and portfolio on your AIGA profile as well as your AIGA Behance  site!

This is just a short list of what is to come in 2016. We’re really looking forward to all of the updates, additions, and collaborations in the following months. If you’d like to get involved with AIGA as a volunteer, please reach out to Tyson Foersterling, our Volunteer Chair, to setup a meet and greet: tfoerserling@portland.aiga.org.

Thanks again for your continued support and insight. We look forward to seeing you all soon!