9:05 a.m., Oct. 23, 2009----Creativity in a hurry under pressure was the concept of Command X, a graphic design reality competition for seven up-and-coming young graphic designers from all over the United States, at the AIGA Make/Think conference held in Memphis. AIGA is the professional association for design.

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University of Delaware alumna Alison Yard Medland, who attended Caesar Rodney High School in Camden-Wyoming, Del., and graduated from UD with a degree in visual communications in 2006, was among the chosen few invited to participate and finished third in the prestigious national competition.

Medland, who worked for Gilah Press + Design for two years, is currently an associate art director for Discovery Creative, the in-house advertising organization for Discovery Channel and others, and lives in Washington, D.C.

For three days, Command X contestants were given a design project and in the space of 24 hours had to come up with a solution and present it to a panel of judges in front of an audience of 2,000 people. Four of the seven designers were eliminated the first two days.

The first project was to design a logo for Graceland, Elvis Presley's home in Memphis. Medland used a crown, symbolizing Elvis as the king of rock 'n' roll, over the word Graceland and a fanciful design of a guitar head underneath. She survived the first round of the competition, and people from Graceland came up to her later and expressed interest in her logo, she said.

The next project was to create a Captain Crunch cereal box for mature adults. Her design showed the well-known hat and white mustache with Captain Crunch written out as a toothy smile. “I thought most people between the ages of 40 and 50 had eaten Captain Crunch cereal as children, so the theme of my campaign was to entice people through nostalgia. My design and campaign came in first,” Medland said.

With three contestants left, the last challenge was totally different. “We were taken to the National Civil Rights Museum after hours-it was very quiet and surrealistic,” she recalled. “We were asked to do any project we wanted related to the museum.”

There was a poem there found crumpled up in a pocket of a raincoat in Selma, Medland said. According to the story, there was a need for blankets during the Civil Rights March, and a woman discovered a pile of them in a church and wrote about them as a “patchwork mountain of rolled up trust.”

“Trust was a huge issue then and now,” Medland said. She devised a project of a poster saying, “Take the risk” with tear offs that said “You can trust me” which could be attached to people or things that were trustworthy. “I thought a web site could be created showing where the stickers ended up--on people, umbrellas, bikes, crosswalks, wherever,” Medland said

Medland came in third place overall. “To be chosen to be in the competition blew my mind,” Medland said. “It was wonderful exposure in front of leading designers in the country.”

Medland said her education at Delaware was amazing. “I didn't realize it at the time but it prepared me for the real world. Ray Nichols was tough love when it came to work-no excuses, get it done, do it well. We were exposed to museums, major designers, and the summer abroad in London was a life changing experience.”

Article by Sue Moncure