Chicago Design Week 2016 | June 3-10, 2016
It’s here, it’s here! The best time of the year (other than summer itself) – Chicago Design week!
It’s a week when design agency greats in the community open their doors to hold public workshops and talks. In other words, it’s pretty much Christmas for creatives in the industry. And AIGA Chicago is one of the organizations making up the great ‘Oz’ behind this amazing week.
“Chicago Design Week is a celebration and a recharge all at once. We get to slow down and embrace everything great that Chicago is making, doing, and sharing. It’s seeing old friends and making new ones. It’s inspiration and new ideas. It‘s a time to be proud of being creative and Midwestern.”
– Mig Reyes, Co-President of AIGA Chicago
Besides providing a great networking and education opportunity, Chicago Design Week is really a way to reflect how much the design community has grown in this great city, and a great opportunity to get artists inspired (and to party!) with their fellow creatives.
Every year, Chicago Design Week has increased its partnerships, mostly because the city is full of ambitious, entrepreneurial designers with creative and business-oriented minds who start projects like the Chicago Design Museum.
“I think that Chicago is a supportive, generous, & active community. It’s a way for us to celebrate the amazing organizations and people who shape the culture of our incredible creative city.”
– Monina Velarde, Mentorship Chair of AIGA Chicago
Other organizations like Society of Typographic Arts and Mas Context have also teamed up with AIGA to fill this year’s design celebration with a number of awesome events. And with those events ranging from color theory workshops with ChiDM, to highlighting the good that Chicago communities do with sessions to talk about designing for good, to celebrating AIGA’s very own mentorship program, this week is nothing short of amazing in its line-up. It completely covers design theory, the creative process, finding a purpose for your work, and just letting loose to meet other designers in the community over hor d’oeuvres and beer (I mean, how perfect is that?)
All in all, this week couldn’t have happened without all the up-and-coming and impactful designers we have here. Because whether you’re a newbie designer fresh out of college or a seasoned creative, it’s still a week to celebrate YOU. As Kelly Knaga, the Director of Communications for AIGA Chicago has shared with us, “I hope they feel proud to be part of a design community that’s making smart, innovative, and exceptional work.”
