Way back in February of 2011 the husband and wife team from Washington’s Green Grocer gave us a call asking if we’d be interested in giving their brand and site a tweak. They’d been around for ages and it seemed that their visual brand had grown up somewhat organically with their business. It wasn’t bad per se, but it felt a little out dated and lacked a sense of professionalism.

When we start working on any brand our main job, as see it, is to create a visual pairing between a company or organization’s cultural brand and their visual identity. WGG’s cultural brand was already extremely well established and they were doing everything right in that regard. However their visual brand just didn’t quite match anymore. While they had quite literally always been a mom and pop business, they were growing by leaps and bounds, looking to expand their client base, and lets face it, were already way more professional in how they dealt with clients and ran their business than their current brand made them look.

However maintaining the fun, hand-made, genuine and personal feel their customers had come to know and expect was of the utmost importance. After all, this was and is the cornerstone of who they are. Zeke is always available to talk with his customers at basically any point of the day (which made our meetings interesting!), and Lisa is constantly engaging with folks on Twitter, Facebook and their blog. The story of WGG is really the story of Lisa and Zeke, their family and their business.

So this is where our mood board process came in and really had its chance to shine. Before our first brand meeting we encouraged Lisa and Zeke to bring along any imagery they might want to include in our mood board process, as it would help establish the direction of their brand, website, and anything else we might end up producing for them. Lisa took to it with gusto, and unlike most clients who will bring in a dozen or so shots, she brought in an entire collage of images on a huge piece of poster board. There were even physical items glued to the board, like bird feathers, beans and measuring tapes. Frankly it was mind blowing, and helped set us up for a fantastic branding process.

One thing that stuck out to us from Lisa’s mood board was all the cut out imagery. As we moved forward with creating their brand, we drew on that for inspiration and came up with a brand treatment that included cut out fruits, veggies and animals paired with a more traditional, established-looking logo. To our delight Lisa and Zeke went for it, and we were off in a great direction.

Soon after getting the brand in place we began designing their new website. With cut out animals already established as part of their brand, the next logical step was to make those animals talk. So we crafted a design that was simple and intuitive, but used chatty animals to give an extra bit of personality to the site.

Washington’s Green Grocer had been working with Inclind, a Delaware based web design and development firm, for years and wanted to continue using them for development. They had an incredibly complex backend system already set up, so our task was was to provide them with designs for all the various pages of the site. Inclind was really great to work with and offered extremely valuable insight throughout the design process – a big thanks goes out to them for all their incredible efforts.

Along with the website, we were also working on business cards and a few other print items simultaneously. Lisa and Zeke made it clear in one of our initial meetings that their drivers are really a huge part of WGG, and that they wanted to make sure their personality was reflected in the cards, so right off the bat we all agreed that normal boring cards were out of the question. Instead we presented a concept where each person would be able to select a personalized cut out image to be displayed on their card, from Lisa and Zeke’s old pickup truck, to a pile of eggs, to some tasty looking veggies. What’s more, we made each person’s name the focus of the card. After all, people are the focus of WGG’s business, so we wanted to make that clear. The end result is a card that’s personal, visually interesting and fun all at the same time.

We’re working on a few other projects with Washington’s Green Grocer that’ll hopefully be finished shortly, but in the mean time that’s it! We’re extremely happy with the way this project turned out and can’t thank Lisa, Zeke, Shaun and the Inclind team, and everyone else involved in this project enough. We had a blast working on it.

Tomas spent the evening Thursday attending the grand opening of SAX, a new restaurant concept by the folks behind OYA and SEI.  We’ve been alluding to some of the work we did for them in previous posts, and now that it’s complete and delivered we can finally talk about it.  The SAX brand and stationary was a blast to work on.  Like the restaurant’s interior, the brand draws heavily on decorative, baroque influences to create a detailed yet bold typographic and illustrative mark. As soon as we finished the logo we said to ourselves, “Man, wouldn’t this look great foil stamped onto a die-cut business card? Too bad the client will never go for that.”  Turns out we were both right and wrong… the client did go for it, and it does look great (if we do say so ourselves).  Best of luck to the SAX / OYA / SEI team with their new restaurant!

And in other news, our buddies in Lindsey Buckingham Palace contacted us again for another poster (you may remember the previous posters we made for them) and we were happy to oblige.  While we sketched out ideas we suddenly realized that of all the possible illustrations relating to the band’s name, we had somehow missed the most obvious option: Buckingham Palace itself. Well, no longer…

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While Bryan was photographing the Thinkinghire package, Tomas wandered over to Smith Commons to take some shots of the wall graphics we created for them.  While he was there he snapped a few shots of their big chalkboard wall which he had drawn the Smith logo on during their New Years party.  At the time it was somewhat lonely up there… no longer.

The wall graphics will be up in our portfolio shortly, so keep an eye out for them!

If you’re not familiar with them, the Gorillaz is a “virtual band” composed of four comic book characters created by Damon Albarn (previously of Blur) and Jamie Hewlett (creator of Tank Girl).  We’ve always been intrigued by the way the band mixes various mediums to create a world for their music.

The concert was a good example of this mix.  In addition to the real band on stage, a massive screen showed various bits of video and animation ranging from fully produced music videos, such as Melancholy Hill and Feel Good Inc., to unfinished storyboards in sketch form.  From a designer’s perspective, it was really interesting to see the different stages of their process.  The music and virtual world aside, we enjoy their visual style, and since we’re all visual people here (go figure), that goes a long way.

The pictures we snapped with our iPhones during the concert sadly didn’t turn out, but these photos (by wonker) are an excellent representation of the concert.

On a more work-related topic, we launched a new site for a (hopefully!) upcoming project at Dupont Circle – the Dupont Underground.  For those who don’t know (which is generally anyone who moved to the area after ‘96), there’s actually an old, abandoned trolley station below the circle.  It lay dormant from 1962 until an ill-fated attempt to convert it into a food court failed in 1996.  Dupont Underground is a new initiative that aims to convert the unused tunnels into a gallery space.

We were honored to be asked to design a website to help promote the initiative. As Adam Griffiths, membership director for the Washington Project for the Arts was quoted in the Washington Post, “There’s no arts district here. You might have galleries clustered in groups of two or three, but there’s no place to go to help the arts spiral out into the surrounding area.” We agree, and we were happy to lend a hand to help rectify that situation.

One of the nice things about working on the site was that we had the ability to be a little more experimental than we are with your average business.  The site is split into thirds (design students take note – rule of thirds!), and uses imagery to abstract the project’s name.  We’ll be adding to the site over the coming months (we’d like to make some more image pairs for the left two-thirds) so keep an eye on it!

SEED’s old website was just that – old. There was nothing horrible about it design-wise, but it felt dated, was difficult for SEED to update and all in all just needed to be reworked.  Their new site has a much cleaner, more modern design and employs a lot of fun, relatively new web technologies by comparison (WordPress, jQuery, video, @font-face embedding, etc).

Besides the great photography that’s spread across the entire site, you’ll notice some fun illustrations here and there as well.  One of our main goals with the site was to make it professional and clean (since it’s for the administrative / fundraising side of the organization), but we also wanted to allude to the children it strives so hard to educate.  Thus the illustrations match the aesthetic by appearing professional and clean as well, but they also display a bit of child-like imperfection.

So feel free to check the site out and give us your thoughts!

One thing we’ve found from working with caterers is that their clients are usually in a constant state of worry.  It’s hard to organize a large event, and it’s especially difficult if it’s not something you do on a day to day basis.  RSVP takes great pride in helping alleviate some of that worry.  During one of our first meetings out at RSVP’s headquarters, we stopped on our way out to examine the numerous framed letters on the wall.  All of them were thank you letters from RSVP’s clients, and they certainly had an impact.  It’s one thing to have a company tell you they’ll take care of everything… it’s quite another to hear the company’s clients say the same thing.  For this reason, we gave these client quotes high priority on the layout.

RSVP also had a bunch of great photography lying around which we were eager to show to their prospective clients.  Thus, rotating diptychs and triptych are employed on every page, ensuring that a client is always seeing a fresh image.

Anyhow, we’re glad to have the site up and running!  Give it a look and let us know what you think.

We’ve also recently launched a couple new websites, one of which is RSVP Catering.  We wrote a whole blog post about the site which we’ll be posting early next week.  But feel free to check out the new site in the meantime!

Our main goal with the website was to visually reproduce what makes Taylor so much more than just your average hoagie shop.  In our first meeting with the Taylor team we were blown away by the sheer number of different textures one finds in their restaurants – brushed concrete, re-purposed shipping pallets, hot-rolled steel and exposed brick to name a few.  Even during our first meeting (before the contract was even signed!), the site began to take shape in our minds.  By using the same textures in addition to other visual elements harvested directly from the restaurant, we think we’ve succeeded in creating a virtual space that feels like it could exist in the real world, and accurately reflects the look and feel of Taylor Gourmet.

Additionally, we thought it’d be fun to include some stop motion animation to give the site a little extra pizzazz.  While waiting for the site to load, visitors are treated to an animation showing the various steps that go into creating a Taylor hoagie, and there are other pieces of stop motion scattered across the site (with more soon to come post-launch).  All in all, we did our best to make each section of the site as unique and branded as possible.  The Press section, for example, isn’t just a list of links to articles, but rather clickable, movable, sortable news-clippings taped up on a wall.

So there you go – the new TaylorGourmet.com is up and running, go take a look!

It was just a few weeks ago that La Palina Cigars asked us if we could design and produce a website in time for their summer launch parties. It was a tight deadline, and a few of us may have drank more coffee than normal to complete the project, but we met it. Right on schedule, La Palina Cigars went live this past Wednesday just in time for the NYC launch party that was recently written up in the Wall Street Journal. We’re looking forward to attending the DC launch tomorrow.

A distinctive feature of the La Palina cigar is its band which features ornate, gold-flake embossing that frames a hand-drawn portrait of owner William Paley’s grandmother (the original “La Palina”). It seemed only right to re-adapt such a beautiful feature for use on the website. The Victorian flourishes, embossed and serifed text, and warm hues on the site reflect La Palina’s rich history.

No one understands the importance of a well-designed graphic identity better than a marketing and communications professional. Well, our own marketing and PR guru came to us looking for a new identity, one with a clean aesthetic and a touch of humor that captures the personality and personal service the firm provides.

The JML Consulting logo and palette were developed from bits of Jenn’s own quick signature and a collection of her favorite hues. Rather than include a basic web address that was exactly like the firm name, she chose to pique the interest of potential clients by using something a little more fun. NomathNoscience.com alludes to the firm’s more creative and tongue-in-cheek approach to marketing, and while it’s just a placeholder page at the moment, it will eventually become the blog. Stay tuned for the full site launch!

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