Myriam LOPEZ

What was your very first job? 

Unrelated to the industry I was an au-pair in Croydon, a suburb of London. After college, I landed an equally glamorous job at New Look, a soft-porn magazine published in various languages. My job consisted in choosing a Spanish name for the ‘girl of the month’ and typesetting it for her spread. You can argue that my first job was actually re-branding girls.

Please describe, in your own words, what your job is and what work it entails.

I oversee different creative teams in their daily fight for coming up with memorable campaigns to promote our (Showtime’s and Smithsonian Channel) programming. These days the caliber of scripts that land on my desk are exceptional, so I feel very lucky to read them and then create from them. We also hire amazing photographers to shoot our campaigns. In between these two phases – scripts to photoshoot – the creative teams are very busy brainstorming, tweaking ideas relentlessly, up until the creative reaches the consumer. My job is to also make sure that the final key art is consistent and effective across all the media platforms.

How did you discover that the creative world was right for you? Was there a time in your life that you credit to this discovery? What was there train of events that brought you to where you are today? 

I got into the creative world by pure chance, I’m very lucky that way. I had no idea what graphic design or advertising was until a fellow international student in London told me she had just graduated from graphic design at a school in Madrid. I convinced my parents to pay for the tuition even though none of us knew exactly what a graphic designer did.

After a few non-glamorous jobs, I went back to school to get my Master’s, still not sure that I’d make it much further in the creative universe. My professors saw what I couldn’t and delivered this pearl of wisdom: You have what it takes. It has taken me a long time to understand what that meant.

In your constantly growing and expanding industry, how do you find inspiration to keep your work fresh, innovative and relevant? 

I try to make new memories every day. Nothing compares to experiencing things for the first time. Nowadays, I’m fascinated by how social media shapes the way we interact with the world.

If you had to pick one piece of work or project that you are most proud of, more for the creative work and innovation it required, rather than its recognition or industry “success,” what would it be? 

It was the late 90s and New York State had decided to raise taxes on cigarettes big time, claiming that it had a big impact on the health bill. When I learned that the number one cause of death and hospitalizations in the USA was for heart attacks due to poor eating habits, and not cancer, it really touched a nerve. I designed a campaign called “Tax Fat” and got published in Adbusters magazine (a self-described journal of the mental environment). It made me proud.