Jay Schacher - Henderson Bas Kohn

Name: Jay Schacher
Company: Henderson Bas Kohn

Jay Schacher graduated from the Sheridan New Media program in 2006. Before that, he went to York for Visual Arts and also Multimedia.

Like many of our guest speakers, he started his career at Organic doing a lot of small production work such as banners and image sizing. After four years in the industry, he then became an Art Director at Henderson Bas Kohn (HBK).

HBK is located between Bathurst and Spadina in Toronto. They specialize in digital advertising, but have started doing some traditional advertising as well. The shop has 60 people working there, and of those, 10 are part of the creative team. HBK has a number of big brand accounts including: Coca Cola, Nintendo, Tim Horton's, Nestle, LG and Mercedes Benz. Of those, Jay designs for LG and Mercedes Benz.

Some recent and ongoing projects that Jay is working on include:

lggetconnected.com
- a hub to showcase LG phones
- entirely product-focused

Power Up Your Life
- an LG campaign
- a game created around the launch of 3 new LG phones
- a website and a youtube video showing people how to participate

driveandseek.ca
- a mobile game for Mercedes
- based on a movie
- winner of the game actually got to win the car

Mercedes Benz Facebook Page
- reskinned the design

Jay also spoke to us about some experiences he's had working with clients. He explained that even if you love your design, it doesn't mean that the client will. He told us an anecdote about the LG Get Connected website design process and how everything about the design was fine except for the navigation bar. He illustrated the design process he took to please the client on this aspect of the website, and showed that it took about 10 iterations of designs before the client was happy.

Some advice that Jay imparted on to our class included staying close to our classmates after we graduate, being sure to network a lot and being a team player at your work and not a hero. He also explained that though it's beneficial to us to specialize in what we're good at, it's important to understand a little bit of everything in order to work more efficiently with different people.

Lastly, Jay gave us some recommendations for building our portfolios. He says to know the shop you're going to (in a digital shop, show digital work), and that having your portfolio online is imperative for applying to digital jobs. He also said that's it's good to show some process work to show how you think and how you evolve your ideas from conception to the final piece.

I really enjoyed Jay's presentation; he was both informative and personable. He gave us some sources of inspiration that he uses (Mashable, Web Creme and Colour Lovers) and even told us his favourite hex colours (#fefefe and #010101).