Jesse Alkire
Location • Title
Denver • Creative Director
Portfolio
One-sentence bio
Call me an art director, copywriter, utility player, whatever—but never call me boring.
Creative philosophy or approach
A big believer in teamwork and bringing out the best in everyone around me, I think my role as a creative leader is to help grow ideas from my team rather than push my own work to the top. Ideas can come from all of us—our experience, our worldview, our personality—and it's my job to inspire and help focus those insights to fuel our work. By starting from a more authentic place, the work we put out into the world will then be more relevant to consumers. Advertising is a team sport and good collaboration fuels creativity.
Recent work I'm proud of
Seeing a need in the industry for a more modern, comprehensive portfolio-building program that was actually affordable for all students, I founded the Denver Ad School. Diversity of thought benefits creative teams more than anything, so by helping students get into the industry that weren't able to previously afford a portfolio school we can hopefully help agencies fill their creative teams with unique voices that otherwise would have gone unheard in advertising. And of course I had a blast creating some of our unique collage art pieces, along with the school's overall brand identity – a dream project for me.
Link to campaign: www.denveradschool.com
Recent work I admired
Preacher's latest campaign for Street Easy is one of the coolest, most gorgeous campaigns I've seen in a long while. The art direction is incredible, that's what pulled me in first. The typeface choices, the pulp novel-inspired illustrations—all perfect. But then there's a lot of depth that ties it all together. The humor and relatability of the copy and the concept as a whole comes from a really relatable place, this campaign was just perfect in nearly every way.
