As the holiday season approaches, I wanted to take a moment to thank each of you for your continued support of AIGA Mobile and to share our recent membership milestone. We now sit at 80 members! This time, three years ago, AIGA Mobile was still in the formation stages and a handful of local designers were working hard to reach a goal of the 20 charter members needed to create a chapter. We have quadrupled that number in a short amount of time and each of you is an important piece of this new and exciting design community we are building.

     In the past year, we have added on two new official student groups from Spring Hill College and the University of South Alabama. Kudos to our local professors and student leaders for their dedication and passion. We have partnered with companies such as IBM and Adobe to bring amazing professional development opportunities on design thinking and new software.  Additionally, we learned to screen print some awesome t-shirts, held networking events and coffee socials so community members can meet and make new friends; and brought together more than 100 students, emerging designers and seasoned professionals from four states at our annual Flourish Conference. 

This weekend the board met for our mid-year planning retreat and we spent several hours brainstorming on ways to make AIGA Mobile even better. What can you look forward to in 2018? Snazzy new chapter membership cards, discounts at your favorite local businesses, annual Memberversary gifts, and awesome programming. You can also mark your calendars for our 2018 Flourish Conference which will be held on Saturday, March 10th at the University of South Alabama. This year’s conference will feature designer and illustrator Jordan Wong as our keynote speaker. Interested in being a reviewer? Sign up here.

If you are already planning your New Year’s resolutions consider making an effort to be more involved in AIGA Mobile. Come out to more events, if you aren’t a member consider signing up, if you haven’t renewed in a while – think about rejoining. We need your help to keep making awesome things happen! We’re also on the lookout for a super cool Membership Director. Here’s the job description.

In closing, I’d like to thank you all again. Please feel free to email me with any questions or ideas you may have for AIGA Mobile. I hope to see you at our Drink & Draw Holiday Party this Thursday, December 7th at the Merry Widow.

With Gratitude,