Nov 19, 2018

Employee Spotlight Series – Meet Senior Art Director, Michelle Afentoulis!

Q&A with Senior Art Director Michelle Afentoulis

For the month of November, we had the chance to learn more about Michelle Afentoulis. Michelle is the senior art director in the creative department here at Elevation. This means she designs creative, oversees creative, and assists in direction of creative. Get to know more about Michelle below!

Tell us about a typical day in the life of Michelle

Workwise – I usually get in around 8:15 am, grab a tea or sparkling water and look at my task list for the day. It could include anything from a powerpoint presentation to tradeshow graphics, to a brochure or flyer and everything in between.

There’s never a “typical” day here, it’s always changing, which is what I love! Some days I’ll work on one project all day long and other days, I’ll work on bits and pieces of 10 different ones. The workload keeps you on your toes.

After the day is over, usually around 5:30 pm, I head home, change into workout clothes and go straight to Pure Barre. I’ve never been a gym type girl, so Pure Barre has been perfect for me. Once that’s done it’s almost 8 and I head back home to hang out with my boyfriend Darwin, dog Gidget and cat Swinston.

If it’s the weekend, you can usually find me working on my blog, hanging out with friends, hiking or getting outdoors, or traveling. I have a huge travel bug right now.

What did you want to be when growing up?

I always wanted to be an architect or a fashion designer. I actually went to school for architecture originally and then started to take graphic design courses, fell in love and tacked it on as a double major!

What advice can you give artists and designers about breaking into an industry, whether it’s in marketing or any other?

I think one of the main things you need to break into any industry is a wide variety of really good work. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you have that particular industry under your belt, if you have the design skills, willingness to learn and a good attitude, that will get you farther than anything.

What inspires your designs?

Oh gosh, practically anything. It could be the texture of a piece of fabric, the typography on a poster, the color combinations in a bracelet. There is so much inspiration out there, you just have to be open to seeing it. I feel like once your designs go stale, it’s because you’ve shut yourself off to seeing the beauty around you.

What has been your favorite project that you’ve worked on so far at Elevation?

I don’t have a particular client or project, but I can tell you that I’ve been loving creating infographics and mood boards.

An infographic, to me, is like a puzzle that needs to be put together. There are so many creative things you can do to connect text to graphics and continue a flow, it’s definitely time-consuming, but finishing a puzzle is just so rewarding – same with an infographic.

A mood board is just fun to me. Putting color combinations together, choosing fonts, image selections, etc. It’s giving the overall idea of what you want something to look like. The vision is the start to it all.

If you could hang out with anyone for a day, alive or dead, who would it be and why?

Anna Wintour – her career is astounding to me and I think it would be amazing to just be with her on her “typical day.” I can’t even imagine the wealth of knowledge she has on the fashion industry and the creative world. It seems like she never stops and I would love to soak in the nuggets of advice she could give me on a variety of topics.

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