A new association between the Miami Ad School and that city's Pinkhaus a design company will see the two entities link physically and philosophically, providing students a new creative breeding ground and bringing Pinkhaus founder Joel Fuller one step closer to his dream of Bauhaus on the beach. Pinkhaus, which merged with The Designory in 1995 (which was, in turn, recently purchased by Omnicom), will create a new office attached to the school and an environment that not only provides a real integration of work and school, but a broader way to approach design and advertising. Fuller says while new talent is sufficiently computer savvy, they are often not equipped for the realities of day-to-day working life. "I wanted to create an environment that was drawing on the energies of a school, where you are experimenting and growing as an individual, but also put that into a working environment." Part of the vision is also to encourage new ways of thinking about the advertising world in general. "Ad agencies as we know them are in the middle of a major change, like the rest of the world," says Fuller. "Maybe it's about communication or something else, but I think it's a lot more than just ads."

Fuller broadens students' perspectives by bringing in unexpected influences, like furniture designers and others who encourage thought "outside the box." "People grow up on computers now, and when you say, literally, think outside the box, it means think outside the computer. There is a whole world around you: fashion, music, architecture. School is supposed to expand our minds in a lot of different areas and it's not just advertising." The building is expected to take shape in the new year, with completion planned in the next year and a half. Fuller is also aiming to bring another level of education to the endeavor; one that focuses on ethics and integrity, which the designer says are important and missing components in the formative years of many.

The big-picture model has been put to use in Pinkhaus' own business approach. The company has done work for Nike, Motorola and, recently, Sterling Commerce, for which Pinkhaus continued to build upon its "big chart" branding system it had created on a Royal Caribbean job years earlier. The system, now being built into proprietary software to be used as a marketing position for the entire company, began as an attempt to understand how a client's business works and involved interviewing all levels of employees and deconstructing the internal workings of a client. The result is a picture of what a client does, how much it spends on what, and how efficient its processes are. "I don't need to do just another Web site; I need to make a difference, and the more I know about a company, the more they can get my thinking," says Fuller. Fuller calls it a means of getting "50,000 feet in the air so you can get a better view of what you're doing," and he applies the long-view approach to education. "A lot of kids coming from school don't see the big picture; they don't see what branding is about," says Fuller. "If we can educate them about that, and if they also learn about different things, rather than just design and advertising, they will be smarter people. Again, it's get away from the box!"

WEB.FILES:
Miami Ad School: http://www.adschool.edu