Ryan Fitzgibbon | News and thoughts

Inbox 1 ”Re: Ryan Fitzgibbon Command X Entry.”

Of course I’m in a meeting when I get an email with this subject line. The immediate rush of nerves and excitement might teach me to never check my iPhone in a meeting ever again. My arrhythmic heart temporally pauses before increasing in intensity. “Dear Ryan, We are pleased as punch…” My eyes skip ahead to count the number of exclamation points in the body of the email. Five. Fuck yeah! I was just chosen as one of seven up-and-coming designers for season two of AIGA’s Command X design reality show!

This deserves a tweet.

In January of 2008, I bought my first copy of STEP Inside Design magazine, Volume 24, Number 1. The feature article; The STEP Emerging Talent List for 2008. I remember curling up in bed and reading it cover to cover. I was fixated on the page by page preview of the ‘25 freshest minds in design.’ I envied every one of them. Hand picked by the most seasoned designers in the business, each young designer had a full page in the magazine showcasing their talent while promoting unimaginable traffic to their website.

Also in this issue of STEP was a humorous article recapping AIGA’s first annual design reality show, Command X. Seven lucky bastards under 26 got to compete on stage for the duration of the AIGA Design Conference in Denver in October of 2007. The contestants were given design problems and eliminated each day based on critiques from design legends Emily Oberman and Bonnie Siegler of Number Seventeen, Noreen Morioka of AdamsMorioka, and Brian Collins, Ogilvy & Mather. The host, Pentagram partner, Michael Bierut, became the Tim Gunn of Graphic Design. It was genius. It was exactly what I’ve been waiting for ever since the days of the Real World Seattle and the first season of Survivor.

In the coming year of school, I founded the first AIGA Student Group at my university in West Michigan. AIGA Grand Valley State University Student Group might have been the longest group name ever, but I was still determined to see it come to fruition. With the assistance of many passionate and talented colleagues, the group was up and running by early 2008.

In April of 2008, I approached Kevin Budelmann, President of People Design in Grand Rapids, MI about his existing interest in forming a professional chapter in our region. Many AIGA members experience a similar sense of distance from their active chapters as the design community in West Michigan felt being over 150 miles from both the Chicago and Detroit Chapters. Once the need was realized, it didn’t take long to rally enough interested professional and student members and non-members to help drive the effort. In what seemed like no time, a phenomenal and passionate team formed to create the most recently inducted chapter of the Professional Associate for Design, AIGA West Michigan.

While this core group was plugging away at making this a reality, I was off finishing my BFA thesis in Graphic Design, while applying to grad schools and internships for the rapidly approaching summer.

Here I am now, nearly three months deep into an incredibly inspiring internship at the global design consultancy, IDEO in Palo Alto, California, preparing to begin the MFA in Design program at the California College of the Arts in two weeks.

Yeah, this deserves a big fat, 140-character tweet and a corresponding status update on Facebook.

The 16 comments and 18 ‘likes’ in a matter of hours surely reaffirms the loyal support base I have that continues to help me achieve the level of greatness that I so blindly and over-ambitiously seek after time and time again. Thank you all. I look forward to taking you along with me as I make my way to the stage in Memphis on October 8. I will see you there.