Learn to Create Ideas You Stand for!

Marina Beldi is an instructor at Miami Ad School and Associate Creative Director at BBH. Here she describes a recent project her students worked on in her "Brand Called You" class.

For the last few quarters, I have been teaching “The Brand Called You” at Miami Ad School in New York. In this course, the art direction and copywriting students shape their portfolios to accurately and creatively represent themselves. As part of the class, I had the students execute a project of their choosing.

For this assignment, they had complete freedom to choose the brand, cause, message, audience, etc - something that some of them have not yet had the opportunity to do in school and something they will not have the opportunity to do in their professional careers.

Once I approved their initial ideas, the students continued to develop their projects every week and discuss their ideas in class. The student teams even had the opportunity to present their projects to my colleagues at BBH for feedback.

Two of my talented students, Ana Miraglia and Jordan Bromberg, decided to create stickers to show what the lack of diversity in Congress looks like on a smaller scale - the NYC subway. They called the project “Not So Representative.”

“I loved that Marina gave us a lot of freedom to start our project and the fact that we had to present something every week, made us work hard and gave us the chance to make decisions based on feedback we got in class.”  —Ana Miraglia

“Marina and our classmates liked the simplicity and creativity of our idea from the start but the feedback we got each week was essential to its effective execution.” —Jordan Bromberg

Ana and Jordan's complete project can be viewed on the Not So Representative website they created. It’s worth taking a look! Adweek magazine just published their finished project.