Well, it looks like we’ve made the big time. Check out the Life Section of today’s Coloradoan and you’ll see the headline “Fill up on Designer Drinks”, thanks to our friend Kate Forgach. We met Kate back in the good ol’ days of the MAC club. Back then the creative folks in Fort Collins would get together to share a drink at the end of a long, client-filled week, even outside of the organized MAC meetings (I believe the term would now be a “Creative Cluster”). This was long before the days of A-Train, Baby Boomer Creative, Toolbox Creative, Tenfold, Linden, Sage Marketing, etc., etc. Back then many of us worked for agencies like the The Jensen Group (now One Tribe), Invision (now gone - a moment of silence please), Coonts Design (now Wirestone), and Burns Marketing among others, and we used to just hang out together. Ah, those were the days my friends.

Now with Refresh NoCo and Designer Drinks, we hope to foster a strong community of creatives that support one another in work and in play. I received an email from an old design friend this morning who had heard about Designer Drinks through the rumor mill. He’d hit a bit of a rough  spot and said he could use a couple of drinks and some laughs. I’m glad all of our creative friends will be at the event to night to make him smile.

Hope you’ll join us too. If you can’t make it tonight, save the date for June 12th. We’ll be road-tripping to Johnstown for our first ever studio tour at Burns Marketing. It’s BYOB, so grab a sixer (or a forty) and meet us in Johnstown.

For those of you too lazy to read the Coloradoan, here’s what Kate wrote:

Long-time marketing types fondly remember the fun and productive Marketing and Advertising Committee, which was active in Fort Collins in the ’90s. Happily, that organization recently was resurrected as Designer Drinks of Northern Colorado, primarily headed by Toolbox Creative Owner Dawn Putney.

Usually meeting on the last Friday of the month, the group bills itself as “a community of designers and marketers working to refresh the creative, technical and professional culture of marketing and graphic design endeavors in Northern Colorado.”

At present, Designer Drinks primarily is a networking group that offers one heck of a good time at get-togethers. This month’s meet-up is scheduled from 4 to 7 p.m. today at the Stonehouse Grille’s Highlands Room, 125 S. College Ave.

Support Kate by reading her blog.