Nancy Murr

Perhaps the first thing you should know about Nancy is that she doesn’t usually refer to herself in the third person. Really. Hardly ever. It’s just that after experimenting with the first person, she concluded that she’d rather sound pretentious than narcissistic. It was a tough choice.

Currently, Nancy does most of her writing in a small Bay Area office, which, curiously enough, comes fully stocked with a cat, two dogs and a troupe of highly opinionated chickens. It’s a far different scene than the one she started out in years ago.

After graduating from UC Berkeley, Nancy became a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson where she wrote award-winning campaigns for Kaiser Permanente and Chevron. One of the nicest parts of her job was getting to travel around the world on shoots. Quite fun when you’re single and not so fun when you’re starting a family.

So after climbing a few rungs and acquiring a fancy title, Nancy left advertising and ventured into the world of graphic design.

The fine folks at Pentagram were the first to roll the proverbial dice on the “ad writer,” a gamble that paid off in years of happy collaborations. Nowadays, Nancy teams regularly with a whole posse of designers for clients as across-the-board as University of California (the system, not the campus) and Whole Foods, to name-drop a couple.

At this point Nancy should probably discuss the overarching philosophy that guides her approach to writing. Problem is, she doesn’t really have a philosophy, overarching or otherwise, unless listening, distilling, crafting, framing and being someone people seem to genuinely enjoy working with add up to a philosophy, which she kind of doubts.

Oh, and has she mentioned that she has a thing about doing standout work? It’s mostly due to her footing. She worries that if she doesn’t do standout work, she’ll accidentally dip her toes into good-enough work and from there it’s a straight plummet into who-on-earth-wrote-that-drivel work. And really, much as she prefers not to, she does need to glance in the mirror from time to time.

There. Enough said. Even Nancy’s tired of reading about Nancy so she can only imagine how you must feel.