
"When you do that, you're more than happy to work hard and get it done."

"Having outside work in your portfolio, instead of having all school work, is great, especially for future employers."īellamy's advice to Moore students is to learn what you love to do, and go for it. She also recommends building up portfolios by offering to rebrand a website or do a redesign for a relative's business. "All those things helped us at the end of the day," she said. Jacobs urges current students to take seriously the networking sessions that Moore offers. It led me to try the entrepreneurial, starting-your-own business thing."

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"You learn about how to brand yourself and how to collaborate with other people," she said. The Visionary Woman Honors Scholarship program provided Bellamy opportunities to network with businesswomen through Moore's annual Women's Leadership Conference. "We are designing all day, but that's ok because we love it," Bellamy said.īoth former students say Moore played a big role in helping them start their careers. Bellamy now lives in New York, and so they text, talk on the phone and have Zoom meetings to check in. They do their Say Less work at night and on weekends. The amount of work they are getting has them thinking about how they could do their joint venture full-time. They've also done work for NAAZ, a boutique in New Orleans. Say Less projects include a rebranding of Jacob's father's barbershop, Ethos GSFM, that began as a pop-up and is now a brick and mortar store that won a 2018 Best of Philly award by Philadelphia Magazine. "He said, 'Are you sure you guys only want to do wedding invitations? Don't pigeonhole yourselves so soon.' We do like branding and other aspects of design, and that's how we grew into starting our own studio." Smith now sends clients their way.Īdvertising has mostly been by word of mouth or on social media. "We thought we should reach out to him to get advice and see what we could learn from him," said Bellamy. "He was doing exactly what we wanted to do," Jacobs said. The two met Mike Smith of the Philadelphia design studio Smith & Diction when he came to talk to students about how he created his business with his wife after working for a few big design agencies and freelancing for a bit. "It was a natural partnership starting in school, then we thought this would be cool to continue to pursue." "We enjoy working with each other," said Bellamy, who was in Moore's Visionary Woman Honors Program. Soon they had more requests, and they began thinking about turning their hobby into a business. The two became friends and collaborated for fun on designing more wedding invitations as a stress reliever from their senior project work.

She asked Jacobs for design advice, and they ended up working on the invitation suite together. At the same time, Bellamy was designing a wedding invitation for a family friend. Jacobs created a wedding-based publication for the class.

"We wanted to work together and do the work we wanted to do, build our own schedule and showcase our work and who we are as people and designers."īellamy and Jacobs became close during their publication design class at Moore. "We didn't see a lot of studios in Philadelphia with people that look like us," she said. Jacobs, a junior digital designer for Urban Outfitters, said they always knew we didn't want to work a typical 9 to 5 job. "We want to provide good design and make it accessible to a wide variety of people." "We design for local startups in Philly, but we are branching out to other states," said Bellamy, who is a designer with Cohere, a creative studio headquartered in Philadelphia. The alums recently visited Moore to discuss their partnership in a presentation to current Graphic Design students. Graphic Design majors Randi Bellamy '17 and Cheyenne Jacobs '17 are partners in Say Less Design Studio, a digital design studio that specializes in brand identity, web design, packaging and publication design. Two Moore alums are working on turning what started out as a classroom project into a full-time business.
