Pittsburgh at dawn

Design Work in Pittsburgh

Recently, Pittsburgh has come into the new for its resurgence due to the twin towers of healthcare and hi-tech. Google has offices here and is expanding. CMU and Pitt do a lot of cutting-edge research in hi-tech and medicine.UPMC is one of the top medical centers in the country.

I know that when when some folks think of hi-tech, they don’t necessarily think of the creative fields. They think of boring coding. Oh that’s a wrong notion, isn’t it? YES.

CMU, for instance, also has fantastic design programs. Bloomfield and Lawrenceville have thriving artistic scenes. Pittsburgh Filmmakers has done some great work in luring movie studios to use Pittsburgh in their shoots. I was actually part of the filming of the stadium scene from The Dark Knight Rises!

Still, I have friends who’ve left Pittsburgh to pursue creative work in New York City and Los Angeles. So I wanted to relay two instances of companies doing creative work in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh at dawn
Pittsburgh at dawn
The first is Derse. Derse isn’t headquartered in Pittsburgh but they do have offices here and are expanding. Derse focuses on face-to-face marketing at trade shows, marketing environment and event programs. They were ranked by Advertising Age magazine as one of the World’s Top 50 Agency Companies, and Top 50 U.S. Promotion and Event Marketing Agencies.

The second is Bearded, a web design studio in Lawrenceville. They’re a small boutique studio of only 6 people but were still recently nominated for Net Magazine’s 2014 Agency of the Year award. But seriously, a design studio in Lawrenceville called Bearded? C’mon, kids.

I don’t want to sound too marketingy for Pittsburgh. I probably do enough of that in general. But I think it bears mentioning that Pittsburgh’s (latest) renaissance isn’t just due to Healthcare or strict Roboburgh/engineeringy work. I work in Banking (or at least the healthcare side of banking) so I could use some reminding meself. Design companies within hi-tech, such as Bearded, Niche, Branding Brand and Derse are also playing a huge role as well.

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