Should We Be Allowed To Have This Much Fun?
If you haven’t caught on just yet (and why haven’t you?) then you should know that one of our favorite times of the year is when we get to work on the City Livability Awards call for entries. You can see several of the past examples here - with more to come in the future - but we couldn’t resist getting the new version up fresh from the printers. Illustrated in a fun and simplistic style, it just brings a smile to our faces. We hope it has the same effect on you. Having worked on this project for well over a decade, it means everything that a piece can still warm our heart every year.
The BCA10 celebrates the very best in businesses supporting the arts and we couldn’t be happier to be a part of their effort. Honoring some of our very favorite companies and brands at their gala (tonight!), as well as touting their achievements across the country (you can see the ads we designed in Forbes and USA Today!) It is just the kind of work that leaves us with an insanely large smile. Insanely large I tell you! The kind of smile you don’t get when you work most places. The kind of smile we get nearly every day!
Highlighting the current move towards hand-made design (and the incredible work of so many stellar firms/individuals) the nice folks at Rockport Publishers took the plunge with me once again via “Dirty Fingernails: A One-Of-A-Kind Collection of Graphics Uniquely Designed By Hand.” Despite having lived with these images for months on end, I can not lie - they still take my breath away! Complimented by my informative writing style, the assembled serves as an informative/inspirational touchstone for an important time in the history of design (if I do say so myself - and I do!) You have to get one in your hands to see the splattered joys of the spot varnish, so get down to your local book behemoth or start your wait at the door for the UPS guy and those sexy legs.
I sometimes labor over solutions, agonizing my way through every minor detail and burying myself in research until I find an idea that suits me - and then I usually need to come up with at least two more! This isn’t one of those moments. In capturing the essence of this program, pairing emerging writers with the area’s most creative musicians, I knew what to do immediately. Sometimes the obvious (to me at least) solution is the best. The key is in how you execute it. Finding the perfect book, I still managed to agonize over photographing it at just the right angle - haha.
Opening August 24th on the fine campus of James Madison University is this selection of work from yours truly. With humble hopes to do the walls of the Sawhill Gallery justice, I would like to think that my work still resonates with today’s youth and at the very least that I can creep them out a little with a three-eyed masked wrestler! It will be wall to wall Foster in there, and if that wasn’t enough for you my little pretties, then get your motors started for the Q+A when I arrive for a tour of classes and one of those fancy talks I like to give on September 14th. (It has to be fancy - I mean it says so right there on the poster!)
No Reservations sees acclaimed madcap chef Anthony Bourdain traveling the world and sampling local cuisine at the street level so that what he ingests is the exact same as the local working class (to keep a perspective, he had a hoagie in New Jersey.) This leads to some pretty wild meals to say the least! In creating a marketing toolkit I followed my own advice and got out of the office and on to experiencing the show focus as quickly as I could. Making my way to a Vietnamese grocery store, I started to assemble the elements I needed to pull off what I had in mind.
Building an identity for a chocolatier that appeals to the current clientele that comes for the high-end product, but is also accessible to the rest of the urban neighborhood with it’s friendly vibe can be a tough trick to perform. Long conversations yielded a play on the chocolate bunny and soon we were on the path to creating that delicate balancing act with a sophisticated execution of a welcoming mark.
What is there to say about these? Eric Hansen’s photos are breathtaking. After sorting through hundreds of options, I decided to use the images as silhouettes on a pure black background, as opposed to the lighter colors usually associated with these types of products. The result led to a much more sophisticated solution. Then, the use of color made an enormous impact on the interior of the address book. Making my way through the images was exhausting (in a good way) but double-checking the actual names was just plain exhausting - but necessary. No detail left unturned over here! All of the little printing wrinkles were fun as well, even if I had to learn a little Mandarin Chinese to convey what I wanted.