I've been with PBN a little over a year now and things are finally starting to flow for me. I'm more calm about centerpieces, have more ideas for our event designs and photoshoots and I have more time in my day to dedicate to coffee outings (which are 100% necessary).

For me, it really takes a few months to learn all of the new things a new workplace offers, a few months to feel comfortable, another few months to feel confident, and another few months to really feel at home. I'm pretty much there now :)

Anyway, a few great things have happened lately.

A couple weeks ago PBN brought home 3 Pa'i Awards. The Pa'i Awards are a local competition between the different publications, both paper and magazine, put on by the Hawaii Publishers Association. We brought home:

First Place for Excellence in Design (Newsprint) for the centerpiece, “Hawaii Chefs Cook Up Business.”
Second Place Feature Photography (Newsprint) for the series of fun portraits by Tina Yuen of the people we talked to for “Hawaii’s Most Wanted Young Professionals.”
And Second Place, Excellence in Illustration for the book sculpture on our Book of Lists cover. The judges said, “Simple in conception, complex in execution." I liked that description.

I was super proud of everything that got awarded. It was nice to help represent PBN. You can see the designs and write-up by our editor here but I do believe the write-up is behind a paywall. So subscribe!

I was totally NOT going to add this one because it might be one of the LEAST flattering of me, but it shows our teamwork so well. Or i'm sneezing... Anyway, this is the photoshoot for our 40 under 40 section in action.

More recently we just finished our 40 under 40 event where we honor 40 super talented overachievers that are under 40 years old. I really couldn't be happier about how the section came out. Tina and I are working really closely now and are finding we work really well as a team. It's fun and rewarding. And she can really make ANYONE fell comfortable in front of a camera, which makes my job of telling them to act like an old Hollywood movie star much easier. The event was a blast. My design even made it onto a Lexus!

Our work! And faces of relief that we pulled it off.

The pages of our special section for the event are in my "weekly" tab, along with some other designs I've been happy with.

And I just realized that since I wrote last that I have been promoted to Creative Director. It is similar to what I was doing before, I'm just much more involved in the overall process and I have a few more responsibilities. Let the creative juices flow!

- brb