As you may recall, a couple of weeks ago we popped on over to Taylor Gourmet for a super secret event where they announced their new breakfast menu. Tomorrow (February 4th) is the first day they’ll begin serving breakfast at their 14th street location, so we’d highly recommend stopping by to give it a try. Their new rissoto balls may actually be the best things we’ve ever tasted.

Earlier in the week Casey, one of the co-owners of Taylor Gourmet, shot us an email asking if we could make a new post-it note for their website. We’ve made a bunch since the site originally launched back in July of 2010, and as Ian got ready to work on the new one he took a moment to review the all the previous doodles we’ve created. It’s amusing to see how they’ve changed.

Below: The first post-it doodle we ever created was just a placeholder. We tossed it into our first design presentation at the last minute thinking, “Hey this might be a fun way to display news on the homepage.” The Taylor guys loved it, so we were on our way!

Below: One of our initial goals was to keep all the doodles as simple as possible. The site itself was designed to resemble a real world environment (”Taylor’s desk,” is one way we thought of it), so we wanted the illustrations to be something someone might realistically draw if they were distracted by some other task. So while Mr. Smiley Face and the sandwich are both a little more defined in this second doodle, it’s all still relatively simple.

Below: Soon it was the holidays, and the Taylor boys wanted to send a simple greeting to their patrons. Mr. Smiley Face’s Christmas present was a hat to keep his nonexistent ears warm.

Below: When Super Bowl season rolled around we came up with this little gem. Why draw a boring hoagie platter when you can draw Mr. Smiley Face somehow defying the laws of physics by throwing a hoagie? Where are your hands, man!? How the hell did you throw that thing?

Below: A little while later Taylor began taking orders online. There were a bunch of ways we could have illustrated this, but we decided to poke fun at movies and TV shows from way back when no one knew anything about the Internet. Ordering online? You mean I can get hoagies through my computer?! Yes Mr. Smiley Face, that’s exactly how the Internet works.

Below: The Taylor boys are social networking masters. Their Twitter feed is endlessly amusing and they’re great about engaging with their customers. But that wasn’t enough for them… so they decided to organize the first ever Hoagie Hunt. It involved David and Casey driving all over DC, tweeting where they were, and then giving a prize to whoever found them first. Mr. Smiley Face’s wardrobe now includes: three hats, two pieces of assorted eyeware and a bubble pipe.

Below: Eventually we got bored with just plain old line art, so we decided to introduce some subtle shading. Add a Huckleberry Finn hat to that wardrobe.

Below: Aaand… yet another hat. This doodle is different from the rest in that it’s the only one that was actually drawn with a real pencil. Usually when Ian sat down to produce one of these doodles he’d do it with his Wacom tablet, however this time it was on the fritz. So the doodle below is a little more rough around the edges than the rest. But hey, that makes it genuine.

Below: In the most recent doodle (which is up on the Taylor site right now), Mr. Smiley Face has gone from being a disembodied, abstract head to a sun god. All hail the Resplendent Mr. Smiley Face and His Varied and Numerous Hats!

So there you have it. From last minute doodle to well-appointed deity, the story of Taylor Gourmet Mr. Smiley Face. He sure has come a long way.

But before Tomas and Bryan can go eat tacos and relax on the beach we actually have to finish the project. It’s always a little interesting working with a client over 2,500 miles away. Thankfully Eric and Alan, the two brothers behind Puesto, are great about sending us pictures of all the individual design elements as they’re delivered so we’re able to make sure things come together properly. Unfortunately we can’t share all these pictures (we need something to reveal at launch!), but here are a couple that popped up in Puesto’s twitter feed a little earlier in the week.

You may recall the big yellow letters we blogged about a few weeks back… well their neighbors have finally been installed and it looks like the exterior of the building is just about finished. It’s looking pretty slick.

Below: New letters waiting to be added to Puesto’s exterior signage.

So pretty.

And that’s about all the interesting stuff we have to talk about this week. Since we’ve been so busy wrapping up Puesto, working on all of our other projects and preparing for an upcoming trip, we haven’t really had a chance to play around at networking events or what have you. So instead, here are some fun cat pictures (after all, this is the internet).

A few days ago we came back to the studio to find a certain kitty helping us organize a big stack of business cards we’d picked up at various networking events. Yimmy: ripe’s client relations expert.

Well no longer! We’re still working on the thing, but we’re excited to finally be able to share bits and pieces of the soon-to-launch Puesto. A new restaurant concept opening up in La Jolla, California, Puesto has a menu filled with fantastically tasty Mexican street food. We’ve been working with them for nearly a year now on their brand along with various print, environmental and interactive pieces. The Adler brothers have been a ton of fun to work with, and we’re going to be sad when the project’s finally finished.

So here are a few of the items we can share. Their brand is super bright, fun and illustrative, so when they came to us asking for some construction signage we took the opportunity to introduce the world to their logo, wild color palette and illustration style. They’re definitely getting some mileage out of that sign, as it seems like every time Puesto gets some press, they end up pointing the camera in that direction.

Puesto is really big into social media, so we applied a similar style to their Twitter and Facebook pages. Their Facebook profile picture also reflects the look and feel of their also-soon-to-launch website. Way back in our early mood boarding stages the Puesto team picked out a bunch of nice wood textures, so that became a big part of their interactive presence. A worn cutting board serves as a background on the temporary splash page we have set up for them. (In fact, that’s our cutting board!)

And while there’s a ton of other stuff we’d love to show, we unfortunately have to wait until the restaurant actually opens! That should be happening super soon, however, so you can be sure we’ll post about it again.

In the mean time, we’d suggest you keep an eye on their Twitter and Instagram feeds where there are lots of little design nuggets to be found. And if you’re in the San Diego area, you should definitely check them out!

The secret? Taylor will begin offering breakfast hoagies on February 4th at their 14th Street location (which is fine by us since it’s within walking distance of our studio). A whole bunch of us showed up to test out their new breakfast risotto balls and tasty sandwiches, and we weren’t the only ones. We ran into a bunch of our old pals like Addie from Green Living Consulting and her little munchkin Van who now has an astonishing amount of hair compared to the last time we saw him, Jenn, long time friend of ripe and marketing extraordinaire from JML marketing + communications, Jim from Grupo 7 who we’ve collaborated with on several projects, and of course the ubiquitous Joe C who we did our best to distract from his work. There were also a bunch of our other folks we’d met before wandering around, including Greg from GregsListDC and Leo from the Thrillist (who we met ages ago when he stopped by ripe to check out the sauca truck). Nice seeing you guys again!

Below is a goofy picture we took during the event… “Strike a pose!” someone told us, so we did. It appears that Tomas and Ian have a slightly different ideas of what makes a pose compared to Bryan. If you haven’t been over to Taylor’s new 14th Street location we’d highly recommend checking it out!

A little later in the week Chef Fredrik of 42° Catering gave us a call and asked if we wanted to shoot his van for our portfolio. We designed the wrap ages ago and have been trying to get a good shot of either it or one of his vehicles for months (the shots we have are dark and crappy), so we were happy to have him swing by. The van’s looking pretty great. Fredrik is just as picky about production as we are, so he regaled us with some amusing stories about his interactions with the folks who applied the wrap. Lets just say he really made sure he got his money’s worth.

Below: Van and truck roofs are often overlooked, but here in DC where so many people work in tall buildings, it behooves one to give roofs some thought. Why not use it to advertise your website, for example?

But we really enjoyed having a short break from our busy schedule. Well some of us did. Tomas, the (apparent) workaholic, spent a good chunk of his break continuing to shoot our portfolio with our buddy Joe C. However since the studio was closed, Tomas and Joe were able to set up shop in our spacious conference area as opposed to being shut up in our somewhat claustrophobic photo studio. The photography is coming along really well, if we do say so ourselves. There’s only a dozen or so projects left to be shot, so we may actually finish before dying of old age.

Ian and Bryan, on the other hand, took the opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge (or rather DC), and spent their breaks in Colorado and West Virginia, respectively. Back in his hometown of Durango, Ian spent most of his time skiing at Durango Mountain Resort and consuming a tremendous amount of tasty food and microbrewed Colorado beer. If you can find it at a specialty liquor store near you, Ian recommends Steam Engine Lager from Steamworks Brewing, or True Blonde from Ska Brewing (careful, music plays automatically on the Ska site), though outside of Colorado those may be tough to locate.

While Tomas and Ian were busy over their breaks, taking pictures and keeping track of things to blog about, Bryan was lazing about, apparently doing nothing. “Did you take pictures for us for the blog?” we asked.

“No, I didn’t do anything interesting,” Bryan replied.

“Then your punishment is drawing something for the blog. We don’t care what it is,” we responded.

So here’s Bryan’s punishment-drawing. He spent the holiday losing games to family members who spent the previous year playing what he called “Friends with Scrambles” online. In his words, he is now “much more educated in the finer, two-lettered points of Chinese spirituality.”

So in terms of things that actually happened this week… there’s not much. We’ve been busy catching up on correspondence, readjusting our schedules, and generally getting back into the groove of things. However we did have a fun creative meeting with some AMA DC folks Thursday evening. We’ve been working with them for awhile and are pals with almost all of them, so we figured we’d make this week’s meeting a little more enjoyable by adding some wine to the mix. After all, Jack Kerouac always talked about creative people drinking wine… why shouldn’t we?

Well it apparently works. Here’s a shot from the start of the meeting: serious people conducting serious business at a seriously organized meeting.

After the meeting: happy people having a jolly time around a productive, creative mess. We’re onto something here…

We usually end up making a bunch of holiday cards every year for various clients, but we’re terrible about making them for ourselves. It’s not that we forget, it just that we can never make up our minds about the design. This year was just like the rest. We started talking about what our card would look like in early October, kept tweaking and adding onto the concept through November, and then ended up in early December with a very cool yet complex and time-consuming design that was just never going to get done.

So about three weeks ago we threw that idea out the window and started from scratch. The holidays really aren’t about extravagance, we decided, but rather being with the people you care about. “Simple and sincere” became the core of our message, so we sat down and came up with a new concept that we felt captured those two ideas.

Thus, our card this year is different than previous years in that each and every one was hand made here in the studio. We grabbed a stack of our favorite paper (the soft, velvety Curious Touch Milk), our x-acto knives, embosser and a bunch of pens and spent a several afternoons crafting a couple hundred cards. If you’re a buddy of ripe, check your mailbox! You probably have one waiting for you.

And of course Yimmy, one of our studio cats, decided he would help with the cards too.

We also spent a large amount of time over the past couple of weeks creating an animated holiday card for a new client, FairWinds Partners. We knew the project was going to be fun right off the bat when in our kick-off meeting they gave us carte blanche to pursue whatever direction we wanted. We eventually settled on a fun little animation that drew inspiration from their logo (a sailboat) and from various holiday stories where toys come to life. It’s a nifty little thing, we’d encourage you to check it out!

So that’s it for this year at ripe! We’ll be taking a much needed break between Christmas and New Years (so no blog posts for you), but we’ll be back come January 2012. Happy Holidays!

Beyond being a visual, story-driven document about the exciting things happening at SEED, the report does double-duty as a fundraising tool for the organization. We were thrilled to hear that last year’s report got the highest return rate of donor envelopes SEED had ever seen, so one of our goals this year was to do even better. Fingers crossed. If you’d like to donate to SEED but don’t have a copy of the report, we encourage you to do so here… they really deserve it.

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.

We’re on the verge of finishing a year long project we’ve been working on with a client out in California.  We’ve blogged about them a couple times previously… or rather alluded to them since they’ve wanted to keep their whole brand secret until it’s finished. We’re so close to having everything complete we can taste it. The brand launch should be happening early on in the new year… so keep an eye out for it.

But anyways, said secretive client sent us a bunch of photos earlier this week of their exterior signage getting installed. It’s always fun to watch a brand get applied to an environment. Stylish business cards and awesome websites are cool and all, but big, shiny custom-made signs have impressive visual impact. We can’t wait to share the rest of the project… but in the mean time here’s shot of the sign lying in pieces in the sign maker’s truck. Wish we’d been there to see it go up!

We also just wrapped up the SEED Foundation’s 2010-2011 annual report, which we’ve been talking about for awhile. Well it’s finally done and has been sent off to the printer! We’ll snap some shots of it when we see proofs, but in the mean time you can check out the electronic version on the SEED site (or just click here to download the PDF). Just like last year, we had a lot of fun working on the project, and SEED has once again proven themselves to be not only a fantastic organization, but a great client to work with. Thanks for being so awesome guys!

Below: Putting together one last physical proof of the entire report before it goes to press.

However we took a break from the chaos this morning to give two GMU students a tour of the studio.  Erik Hansen, a professor over at GMU, has been one of our buddies for awhile. He’s a talented guy who we worked with on a project years ago, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. Awhile back he invited Tomas to come out to GMU for a portfolio review and to speak about presenting yourself professionally as a designer, and he’s been pestering us to let a couple of his students come tour the studio for ages. We finally relented and told him we’d be happy to show his students around as long as they showed up at 9:00 sharp… Making terminally-sleep-deprived students get up early seemed like a good way to judge their level of sincerity.

Turns out that his students passed our test, as Heather and Lindsey came knocking on the studio door bright and early this morning. We chatted with them about our design process, showed them some mood boards and early logo sketches for a couple of projects, and then spent a good hour or so answering all their various questions. It’s easy for us to forget how complex running a studio can be and how little of the business side of things gets taught in school.  For example, as a student you never really learn how important client relations, contracts and time management is in design… you’re too busy learning theory and improving your craft! (which, of course, are both incredibly important)

Hopefully we were able to give Heather and Lindsey a good idea of what it’s like to work in a studio on a day-to-day basis – they certainly had a lot of great questions. Thanks for visiting!