Family, Hospitality, Classic… a few of the themes around the office lately. We’ve been working on the brand for an upcoming, local restaurant and we presented a few of our favorites to the owners today.

A throw back to the good ‘ole days of design school. I orchestrated a 2 hour charette for our production gurus along with F O R M O’s new Intern Intern (Angela) on Monday. Within that compressed time frame they were to concept new ideas for the DPS luxury  bags. The bags are a billboard for the brand and are utilized predominately in PR events to holster DPS property specific media such as books and brochures along with take-aways and gifts.

Afterwards, they posted their ideas onto the conference room wall and presented them to the entire team. I was very impressed and quite happy with the results. They questioned sizes, materials and colors and arrived at a range of ideas from complex and colorful to simple and elegant.  It warms my heart to know that a good charette still works wonderfully-Nice work!

As we develop digital strategies for our clients, we find ourselves more and more thinking about the relationships between a series of interconnected online experiences versus the traditional hub and spoke idea of one central corporate dot com. A brand exists online today in an almost limitless and uncontrollable number of places. From twitter “twits” to specialized social networks to mobile to your grandmother’s blog, brand’s must enable and foster the portability of their content while still trying to maintain some common threads.

The above diagram represents our current view on how we develop our client’s prescenes online. A “cobweb” of interconnected experiences that play a part in an overall brand expereince. Each piece has its own roll to play and enables a brand to engage a user at the appropriate crossroads in their life. The most exciting part of this concept is the flexibility that it gives the creative. By engaging people in numerous different environments we are able to contextually focus our messages and visuals resulting in a more authentic and engaging communication.

Art Of The Title
http://www.artofthetitle.com
From “Cowboy Bebop” to “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” this site is a fantastic collection of some of the best title sequences ever done. Each sequence is viewable in a very decent quality quicktime as well.

Gerd Arntz Web Archive
http://www.gerdarntz.org
This site is an unbelievable archive of the work of Gerd Arntz. From his pictograms and visual signs to his stunning statistical visualizations, this site can provide hours of inspiration.

Wordle
http://wordle.net/
Wordle is a JAVA Applet that creates beautiful word clouds. You can paste in any text you like and then adjust typeface, color and layout to create some very nice typographic layouts. FUN:)

Recently we completed a campaign to celebrate the launch of our client’s private 5700 ft jet strip (the longest in the Caribbean). The campaign began with the creation of an emblem for the airport itself. The emblem was inspired by the original wings worn by Frontier airlines’ pilots from the 1950’s and 60’s. The end result was a sleek and elegant mark that pays homage to those maverick pilots and reflects the contemporary aeronautics of today. In addition to their many other uses, the wings were cast in metal in order to create an original and authentic pilot’s wing pin for the prominent members of the Turks & Caicos Sporting Club.

For the invitation to the launch event, the wings were embossed and foil stamped in silver metallic ink on the cover. As you flip open the piece, you begin to see the markings of the Ambergris Cay Jet Strip on the interior. The invitation unfolds vertically downward revealing more of the jet strip panel by panel along with the copy describing the celebration of the jest strip opening. Once the invitation is completely open, the reader is able to view the scaled Ambergris Cay Jet Strip (MBAC) in its entirety. The length and dimension of the invitation were designed to highlight the magnitude and scale of this incredibly eco-engineered private jet strip.

The invitation was a complex print piece that needed to express quality, refinement, and luxury. The product exemplified this. Its paper stock was a thick, five star metallic sheet which was foil stamped on both sides. The interior carries a white foil stamp that mimics the jet strip’s markings while the copy is foil stamped in a metallic silver. The black of the airstrip was carried out with an aqueous coated oxidized ink. Inspired by aeronautical engineering, the packaging was composed of an elegant and chic, charcoal translucent envelope.

Other elements from this campaign included rich media and video ads exclusively placed at wsj.com/realestate and an email campaign. We will be sending a video crew down to document the big opening show so we will be sure to share.

Amazing work by an amazing team!

Very exciting seeing the first round of identity ideas from Aeron and Caryn last week! The team presented several concepts that were amazingly well thought out and much farther along in terms of being realized that any of us thought we would see. Their presentation was nice in that they showed the various marks and looks and feels executed in several business formats across all of the concepts.

The boldest concept featured the F in Formo alone as very strong icon. They used the F in a very cool geometric fashion, even using it as window to create negative space with photography. The big F however quickly felt too bold and dominating for the vibe we were trying to capture. It also kind of looked like we were putting a big F as in a grade on a paper from school DOH!

Two fantastic concepts from this first round have survived so far. The first being the idea of a “brand sleeve” for the container for our business cards. This sleeve would only feature the logo and maybe the www. The card when pulled out of the sleeve would reveal a unique full bleed image, specific to each persons card. Very Cool! The second concept is the idea of a controlled scribble as an accent. More on this in round 2.

Here is the PDF of the first round.

Be Gentle!