Dear Portland,
2018 is coming to a close and we would like to take this time to celebrate and reflect on what the past year has been like. In addition, we are extremely excited to share with you our recent efforts in design community research, which you can look forward to seeing AIGA Portland take action on in the new year.
This past year we continued to bring you installments of our popular event series like Career Tools, dMob and Studio Tours. We introduced the new series, Member Meetups, as well as our initiative-based efforts for: Design for Good, Diversity & Inclusion, Education, and Women Lead. We brought back annual events such as: dMob dLux, The MIX: Portfolio Review, and OPEN HAUS.
Here’s a look back at some of our events from 2018.
Another achievement worth mentioning is that earlier this year, AIGA National recognized our chapter’s online content at the AIGA Leadership Retreat. If you haven’t checked out our various articles and interviews on our blog yet, you should here.
The first 90 days is a crucial window of time for any individual assuming a new role, especially a role in leadership. The AIGA Portland Executive Team is made up of both new and familiar faces. As a volunteer organization, we took the last five months to really get a handle of being the new Executive Team and it has been a blast.
The path to a strategic intent is always a demanding challenge. We have been saturated, and will continue to saturate ourselves in qualitative and quantitative data to help inform and iterate our collective vision towards 2020. And we will continue to do so through engagement with the community to ensure what we are doing is actually working. More specifically we will focus on driving membership, partnership, and sponsorship.
Through the process we’ve developed new relationships with Portland studios in the area, in particular, we worked with Ben Gallagher of B+A, a creative research studio based in the UK starting up a new office in Portland. We also worked with Matt Adamo, Stacey Rutland, and Kat Sutton from Particle Design, a research agency based in Portland. There are many more Portland studios and Portland creatives to engage with, and we want to work with all of you in any way possible. In fact, we have a number of open volunteer positions that you should consider applying for!
Our research led us to our new mission statement:
We are AIGA Portland. Our mission is to develop and enhance Portland design careers, welcome and connect new and seasoned members of the Portland design community, and celebrate the exceptional work and accomplishments of Portland designers at every level.
We will accomplish this mission in 2019–2020 by restructuring the communication and engagement strategies that impact our community of members, non-members, and volunteers. These new communication and engagement strategies will help us better serve our community while ensuring that every participant feels welcome and appreciated.
We are AIGA, the professional organization for design.
Here’s to the new year ahead!
Salvador Orara | President
Monica Mo | Vice President
Katie Lane | Treasurer
Jennifer Pantages | Interim Secretary
*Photo by Matthew Taylor
