Starbucks created an event recently that our Portland office jumped at the opportunity to promote. It’s called Starbucks Salon and it starts this week in New York during Fashion Week. Specifically, it’s 10 days of free music, art, spoken word, and more. After New York, future plans for the Salon include London, San Francisco, Beijing, and Shanghai.

It wasn’t easy to develop the ideas and even more difficult to get them produced. That said, W+K Portland were able to pull off an amazing website, banners, print in the NY Times, and a borough’s worth of great outdoor work around the event.

The overall concept was created by Brad Trost and Andrew "A.C." Dickson; it focuses on the idea of self expression, using the self portrait. They started by creating sketched portraits of the artists performing at Salon, which also act as main graphics for the website and in the advertising. Even cooler though, is the tool they created on the website that allows people to create their own self-portraits (using the same strokes they used) and submit them to be posted online, or to be hung on a wall inside the physical Salon space while the actual event is happening. It’s really interactive, and pretty great. There are already over a hundred examples of people expressing themselves in interesting ways in the "Portrait Project" – check it out here: http://www.starbuckssalon.com/

The hub of the whole project is the website, which was created here in-house at W+K under the amazing guidance of Bev Davis, and by the careful hands of Paul Bjork and Laurie Brown.

If you’re in New York, check out the event – it’s free. If you’re not, create a portrait of yourself on the website and it should be printed out and included on the wall at the 76 Greene Street space in Soho. You might even make it into a published book of portraits when it’s all over.

Simon McCrudden, top W+K planner, has started a blog. This is it. He’s set himself the challenge of coming up with an idea a day. Not necessarily a good idea, just an idea. But I do like his thought about "a series of concerts (perhaps called ‘As Influenced by’) where bands played a set list of the 10 or so songs that influenced them most (before obviously playing a set of their own songs). Personally, I would love to hear the White Stripes playing The Stooges, Sonic Youth playing Velvet Underground, or Dylan playing Johnny Cash, to name just a few examples."

I’d like to see Nick Cave doing Leonard Cohen. Or Interpol doing Joy Division.