Yes, the medium is the message

Recently, Levine worked with the Koshland Science Museum in creating an advertising campaign that raises awareness of their new, highly-interactive exhibits. In keeping with the technologically advanced vision of the museum’s exhibits, we found an especially fitting medium for the ads. In some of DC’s busiest areas, 30 newly installed electronic bus shelter screens rotate through our ad series. The timing was perfect, as the Koshland Science Museum was one of the first organizations to take advantage of these brand new half-million dollar digital screens. 

I decided to take a quick drive around town to see and photograph the digital ads "in the wild." We had already monitored our campaign roll out in newspapers and in the museum’s long spans of window graphics. But experiencing it in the luminous and changing digital displays was (pardon the pun) electrifying. You can find out more about this campaign in our portfolio. To read more about the Koshland Science Museum, please visit their website.

—Monica 

Daniel Berbubé-Arbello: Designer

The gang at Levine has requested I introduce myself…I’ve ventured into self-referential territory many times, writing short fiction in between the waves of book binding, stuffed monster making, drawing, and installation art. So, sitting at my computer at Levine, with a group of people more apt to be referred to as a family-away-from-family, I’m finding it hard to keep the metaphors buttoned-up and tucked-in. I’ll do my best, because, as with any new introductions into an orphanage, a newby-orphan must put his best foot forward.

I was born beside the Great Pit of Carkoon, where Star Wars was filmed. Lucas Arts set up shop several meters from my parents’ mobile home in Yuma, AZ in 1982, a year before I was born. It was just the beginning of this long, strange trip. As a toddler, my parents tell me I liked avant-garde-dancing to Paula Abdul music videos and making weird installations in my bedroom using sheets and Lincoln logs. I spent the majority of my primary school years selling drawings of TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and made-up Mortal Kombat characters for 25¢ each.

I managed to get into a high school visual and performing arts program with my drawings of mythical beasts, steroid-pumped musclemen, and hot rods. My exploration of contemporary art created a venue for photography and installation art layered upon my otherwise campy visual vocabulary. In college, I found the perfect outlet: design (despite the aspirational dream of becoming a real-life Forsythe-Barney Frankenstein*.)

My first design job was working for Flat, a brutally-hip ad boutique on the outskirts of Chinatown in Manhattan. It was in these eclectic, trash-filled, oddity-riddled streets that l truly found my footing in design as a career, helping a small ad agency create faces for faceless products and projects. But, love was found, a child was created, and suddenly the city was too small. We moved to Pittsburgh and I set up shop. Through editorial design, branding, and consulting, I let the endless effects of typography’s subtle power ripple over the banks of every project any client would let me wade in.

—Dan

* William Forsyth (Frankfurt Ballet Creative Director) and Matthew Barney (Film, video artist, husband of Bjork)