Details Tag

July 15, 2014 In Behind the Scenes, Design, General, Ideas, nonprofit

Behind the Design: Ten Thousand Villages Greensboro 10 Year Anniversary

Way back in 2013 we were asked to help our local Ten Thousand Villages store celebrate their upcoming 10 year anniversary with a logo and supporting marketing materials. We love everything about this store- from it’s mission to the amazing products available… so of course we jumped at the opportunity. Plus good karma points couldn’t hurt right?

The logo

Our first task was to create a logo that echoed the Ten Thousand Villages brand but also could live on its own. We started by meeting with the wonderful Joelle Neally, store director at Ten Thousand Villages Greensboro, to hear her thoughts on the logo. We also took a look around the store and instantly became inspired by the various textures and patterns found throughout.

Armed with our research we put our thoughts into the computer and presented a couple different directions to the leadership of Ten Thousand Villages Greensboro. We wanted to present a range to them, each with a different feel and flavor.

Concept presentation

In the end the board decided to go with this version of the logo:

Final logo

This idea not only prominently highlighted the important “10 Year” part of their anniversary, it also pulled in a lot of the textures and patterns we found on our store visit. All while working together with the current Ten Thousand Villages Greensboro logo. We felt like this logo was sturdy enough to exist tiny or large, in print or digitally.

The work

Once the board chose which direction they wanted to go, we went to work on adding their new logo to multiple marketing pieces and social media applications. Below is some of that work:

Ten Thousand Villages Greensboro Twitter Profile

Ten Thousand Villages Greensboro Facebook Page

Wedge flag for outside of store

In addition to the in-store celebration, Ten Thousand Villages also set up a Ten Year exhibit at the Greensboro Historical Museum. We were happy to help create the signage and posters for the exhibit explaining the overall mission of Ten Thousand Villages and how this wonderful store has positively impacted our local community.

Banners at the Ten Thousand Villages Greensboro exhibit at the Greensboro Historical Museum

Poster at the Ten Thousand Villages Greensboro exhibit at the Greensboro Historical Museum

We are happy to be a part of such a wonderful organization and really enjoyed working with Joelle from Ten Thousand Villages Greensboro. We look forward to helping her celebrate their next anniversary!

June 23, 2014 In Design, General, Ideas, Opinion, Spotlight

Lowes Foods Redesign

At the risk of sounding hypocritical I’d like to discuss a logo redesign that was just unveiled. The redesign I’ll be digging into is for one of our local hometown grocery stores: Lowes Foods.

Growing up about 30 minutes west of where Lowes Foods started I was familiar with this brand early on, but I was always confused about the name. Are they connected to Lowes Hardware? Owned by the same people? After all Lowes the hardware store is also headquartered in NC but down in Charlotte. We never really shopped at Lowes Foods though when I was little so it wasn’t until I moved back to the area after being away that I really checked out the grocery store.

My first impression of Lowes was low end, basic grocery store. I had just left Florida, land of Publix, where I fell head over heals in love with that wonderful store “where shopping is a pleasure.” So my grocery store bar was set very high and Lowes just didn’t do it for me. At that time I felt like they did not have a solid and clear statement to the shopper about who they are and what they stood for. They were, you know… just a regular grocery store.

Over the years I’ve only dabbled with shopping at Lowes. Part because its not convenient for me personally, part because I just don’t like the place. I can count the number of times I’ve shopped at Lowes over the last 7 years on my two hands.

So you can imagine my absolute shock when I noticed earlier this past week that they had redesigned their logo- and it was pretty amazing. Retro inspired cool, the new script logo looks great. Feels historic but fresh at the same time. Has a great energy and is light years ahead of the old mark.

Following the logo redesign I went over to their website and, to my delight, saw they had redesigned that as well. The visual language they’ve set up is consistent, interesting, and with enough variety to keep things engaging.

My favorite parts of the whole redesign is what Lowes calls their “Originals.” These are basically “stores-within-the-store”. Whole Foods is famous for these — the beer bar that will fill your growler up while you sip on a pint, the BBQ shack right down the aisle from canned goods. But this concept at Lowes Foods? Who’d a thunk? The design of each “Original” is unique but consistent and contributes to the overall feeling of what Lowes is putting forth. The concepts are very cool- a craft beer bar, a sausage makery, a fried chicken joint, and a couple other community focused ones that holistically make Lowes feel like more than “just” a grocery store.

Images via Lowesfoods.com

For me, “The Beer Den” tops my list. I’m digging the overall rustic, modern, hand crafted feel of the space as well as the bold type and illustrations used. The printed growlers add a nice touch of specialty and reinforce Lowes’ new position as craft beer experts. Just look at that bear art — bad ass!

Image via Lowesfoods.com

I’ve yet to step foot in a newly redesigned Lowes. All of my conclusions have been drawn purely based on the digital work put out there by Lowes and their agency of record, The Variable. So will it all fall apart in the store? I’ll be very interested to see when I plan my next visit. What I’m even more curious about is what will these bold statements do for Lowes’ business? My hope is it works out for them. They’ve embraced design as an important factor to move the needle and as a designer I want badly for that to work out for them — if it does, other companies will take notice and the success story will raise our industry. Fingers crossed.

Kudos to the in-house team at Lowes Foods and the team at The Variable for doing such an amazing job on the redesign and on all the other work needed to make it sing.

June 2, 2014 In Coffee, Design, General, Ideas, Observation, Packaging, Spotlight

Post Revisit: A Snapshot of Specialty Coffee Packaging

Its always good practice (and fun!) to take a look back and reread what we’ve written about during the life of our little blog. We recently revisited a post from August 2013 titled “A Snapshot of Specialty Coffee Packaging” (click here to read.)

The post focused on coffee packaging — where we’ve been, where we are presently, and where we predicted we were going. While it was good to revisit the whole post, we’d like to focus on that last bit — the part where we predicted where we felt the specialty coffee packaging was moving towards. Below is the actual snippet from our post:

“We believe the future of specialty coffee packaging will move away from the simple, clean, industrial look for a more expressive style that really shows the personality of the brand. We think customers don’t need to see another kraft bag to denote quality and an expressive bag will also do a better job telling the story, something that is resonating more and more with shoppers nowadays .”

The reason we revisited this post is because we’re seeing a lot of examples of the very thing we were predicting (which is very exciting) which means we might know a little bit about what we do!

Two great examples of what we predicted coming to life are Starbucks special Tribute Blend packaging and Brewklyn Grind Coffee Roasters rebrand and packaging. Both hit home the thought we put forth about “moving away from clean, simple industrial look” and move towards “a more expressive style.” We even had conversations about how cool coffee packaging would be with fine art prints on the label- something Brewklyn pulled of nicely.

Image via The Dieline

Starbucks Tribute Blend

As you can see in the Starbucks packaging they are getting really conceptual with this design. Take a look at that bag. It’s just designs and elements with this beautiful painterly circle as the focal point. The asymmetrical design is very eye catching and grabs your attention on shelf. There’s no denying the contents are something special and unique.

Starbucks is no stranger to expressive packaging and is one of the few specialty coffee companies whose packaging moved away from the kraft coffee bag look long ago — but the Tribute Blend feels new and fresh. We feel like it really embodies the vision we laid out back in August.

Image via The Dieline

Brewklyn Grind Coffee Roasters

Brewklyn Grind has really embraced expressive fine art for their new packaging and redesign. What’s really neat about Brewklyn Grind is they are collaborating with local Brooklyn artists to help create the art for their packaging. It’s not just some random digital design they’re using. We find this to truly embody “artisan” and take it to a whole new level. Why not make each bag a little work of art? Those who appreciate fine coffee are usually the same people who appreciate fine art.

So there you have it. We’re very interested to see how this trend will play out in the coffee packaging landscape over the next year or so. Who knows- we might have to revisit this post!