at Dia:Beacon
Andrea Noble
People often ask about my personal branding, so let me start there. In addition to the more obvious connection to my name & website acronym, this identity represents my north star as a creative. To get grammatical, "and" is often used to join two verbs so that together they are equivalent to an infinitive of purpose, or to join two nouns to indicate connection or addition. While this is an overly-simplified summary of a powerhouse conjunction, it sums up the elements of business that are most important to me: acting together, identifying a purpose, creating connection, and adding real value.
With a BFA in Communication Design from Washington University in St. Louis, I moved to New York a week after graduating in 2010. My work since has since taken me on a journey with stops at Interbrand, G2 (now Geometry Global), Blue State Digital, and Clear Strategy. Throughout my roles at these diverse companies, I’ve collected experience in branding, digital, retail, print and strategic design across a wide range of clients.
As a freelancer at Interbrand straight out of school, I learned the value of quick iteration and brand storytelling that honed my conceptual skills. In my 3½ years at G2 that followed, I worked on small teams to develop identity and campaign ideas for Febreze, COVERGIRL, GSK and Pringles. Often I took on the role of project manager, copywriter or facilitator to keep our projects on track, building skills in art direction and leadership along the way. At Blue State Digital, I collaborated on new business pitches, digital campaigns, and websites for the NAACP, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, Child Mind Institute, YMCA, Heifer International, Danone, and various Google initiatives. In these 2½ years of working for both non-profit and corporate clients, I was exposed to a number of challenges; I studied diverse audience needs, fundraising & persuasion tactics, and often considered how to customize projects for extremely varied budgets and objectives. My favorite growth experiences, however, were internal — I took on a leadership role within our BSD design team to facilitate a cross-country critique group and spearheaded a trio that worked to showcase designers as thought leaders in and outside of our company. My desire to take on management and embed myself in insight-led creative took me Clear Strategy, where I worked most recently for 2 years. With a lean design team, I streamlined our internal processes, elevated marketing materials, contributed to research, perspectives & workshops, and collaborated on a comprehensive array of projects including brand guidelines, experience maps, category visions, and product and packaging innovation for clients including Pepsi, Texas/Church's Chicken, Mondelez, ZonePerfect, and Heineken.
In 2020 I graduated with an MS in Strategic Design and Management from Parsons, and I now work at BCG Digital Ventures as a Senior Strategic Designer. I’m grateful that I get to learn about humans, solve problems through innovative ideas, and tell stories every day.