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Juror Spotlight
Rudy ManningFounder & Chief Creative Officer,Pastilla
Rudy Manning is an award-winning creative director, designer, speaker, and educator. For more than 24 years, Rudy has remained committed to the belief that graphic design, in its truest form, has the unique ability to bridge cultural and disciplinary boundaries. With that mindset, Rudy founded Pastilla Inc, a leading digital agency built upon strategic creativity, which encompasses digital, print, film & animation, advertising, and marketing.
As the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Pastilla, Rudy has played a pivotal role in launching and shaping some of the world’s most successful products, companies, and institutions such as; Disney, SAP, ESPN, Coca-Cola, Golden Globes, the City of Los Angeles, and Pivotal Ventures- A Melinda Gates Foundation. He also worked with Microsoft to introduce the Surface tablet to the world through an award-winning advertising campaign which proved that Microsoft was focused on taking hardware to the next level.
Having immigrated from Panama to the United States, and lived in Germany, Rudy’s approach to design thinking was shaped by his diverse cultural upbringing and is a critical ingredient to his success as a designer, leader, and subject matter expert.
He has been published internationally in numerous design journals, including the venerable Print, Graphis, I.D., and HOW. He has also won multiple awards and recognition, including Print International Design, HOW Awards, w3 Awards, THEA Award, Telly Award, IXDA Showcase, Creativity International, and American Center for Design 100 Show.
Locally, Rudy is also the president of the board of Art Division, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting underserved youth in MacArthur Park, primarily Latino immigrants.
What’s one thing you wish you knew when you first started your career?
I always felt that I had a natural knack for business, but looking back now, I realize I needed to figure out where I was going from a business point of view when I started my creative studio. I wish I had devoted more time to the studio business earlier, almost as much as the work. Things in the first 12 years of the studio would have been easier. But, as they say, “in hindsight, it’s always 20/20.”
How would you describe your personal style?
I have always consciously tried to fall into a particular personal design style. Some people might read this and think you have a style, but I don’t approach design thinking from an internal point of view.
Design starts externally first. Therefore, I like to arrive at design solutions that are directly driven and inspired by the problem or message I aim to solve. This mindset gets us to deliver bespoke creativity. We first look at the problem we’re to solve; inherently, every problem is unique; therefore, the creatives produced are inherently different.
What music can you listen to on repeat but never get tired of?
Max Richter: “On The Nature Of Daylight.” Simply writing this makes me want to listen to the song right now.
What’s one of the greatest innovations you have seen in your industry?
I’m not concerned that AI will replace our industry. We will evolve and use it as another tool that will transform and scale the ideas we produce, and it’ll evolve how we use our critical thinking in the design process. It’ll be an impact design just as the computer impacted design. And guess what? Our industry is doing just fine.
What’s your dream project?
My creative agency and I have grown passionate about the work we do with the civic and public sector work we do. For example, we recently rebranded a mid-size city here in Southern California. It would be amazing to get the opportunity one day to rebrand a symbolic, multicultural historic city like Los Angeles. It would be a dream project that would culminate all the design disciplines I’ve worked on in my design career, and it would be an honor to take on a project of that scale.
What changes would you like to see in your industry?
I’d love to see continued investment and focus on diversity & inclusivity in our industry. I want our industry to reflect something other than our world. I would love to see a significant change in the next ten years. I don’t want to get that “pleasantly surprised feeling” when someone of color interviews us for a job. As creatives, it’s our job to radiate ideas and messages to the world, so therefore the folks working on those ideas and messages need to be created by the same world we’re communicating to. A world comprised of humans with disabilities, people from diverse cultural backgrounds, and people with different socio-economic backgrounds.
What categories are you looking forward to reviewing for the w3 Awards?
I’m excited about many categories, but one particular group of categories I’m interested in is the Public Service & Activism and Social Impact space categories. Then I’d say the Best Art Direction and Best Use of Visual Effects in the video.