Latest thinking on emerging and sometimes difficult ideas for changemakers.
Explaining the core ideas on running a design-centric and agile organization.
Quick looks at some of our visual work.
Re-imagining the Asian Archives site
A cookbook designed and illustrated to tell the story of a single family's heritage.
A personal project for partner Alex Blaiotta, she began by documenting and hand drawing all the many family recipes she had learned and remembered over her lifetime. Collecting recipes from her family and the memories that came with them, she compiled this book as a love letter to her family.
Fine jewelry brand, Authorne, needed an online presence and portfolio for their one-of-a-kind sculptural wearables.
The biggest challenge of this project was creating a site that not only felt experiential but also spoke to the complex inspirations behind the brand and the collection. Unlike a traditional e-commerce site, the intension behind this site was less about a check out process and more similar to a fine artist's portfolio. In place of traditional product pages, we created pages for each design motif that helped paint the picture of how the artist behind the brand, Rachel, could interpret these motifs into one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces for her clientele. We showcased her unique approach and perspective by creating collages of sketches, inspirations, and final pieces for each motif.
Ville Ferrano's wine gets its name from the twin villas on their tuscan estate called Le Coppiole. Le Coppiole, meaning " the couple" in Italian, is close to the owners hearts as it was one of the first properties that launched their agriturismo and personifies the couple themselves. So when designing the wine crate, we wanted to realize the wine's namesake on the box itself.
We crafted a brand identity, name, and custom typeface for an heirloom jewelry house.
Founder & Creative Director, Rachel Bu, wanted to create a bespoke wearable heirloom that spoke to her own unique history and that she could one day pass on to her own children. With a background in sculpture and her BFA from School of Visual Arts, Rachel always had an affinity to bringing stories to life through beautiful, 3-dimensional objects.
She set out on a mission to create one-of-a-kind and limited edition modern day heirlooms in the form of wearable art pieces & digital objects.
Rachel had very clear visions on the stories she wanted to tell with this first line, the style, and the designs of the pieces but she needed help to conceptualize the brand as a whole. The challenge here was bridging the sometimes dichotomous industries of art and fashion. She wasn’t creating mass produced jewelry designs, she was creating bespoke and limited edition pieces of jewelry. This business model felt more synonymous with that of an artist and art studio than a jewelry shop.
Our task in launching Rachel's first collection was to create a brand that evoked the individuality and romanticism of the pieces themselves. We developed Authorne from scratch, creating an evocative name that felt just as confident and fearless as the pieces. Inspired by the wearer, an individual who blazes their own trail, Authorne invited people to “wear their own story” for oneself not for an outsider’s gaze.
The name Authorne was born from that exact sentiment. It felt like a family name that could prevail and be passed on for generations to come. It inspired one to be the author of their own story and to adorn oneself accordingly.
A series of custom illustrations created for Bond's social campaigns.
We storyboarded, designed, and animated financial education videos for the BIPOC community. Here's a short peek of what we created for these videos.
Many of the financial literacy tools that currently exist are dry, drawn-out and often times explain financial concepts in sweeping generalizations that only speak to a subset of the American population, the white upper middle class male. Yemi, OfColor’s founder, wanted to change that. When approached by Met Life to create co-branded content for their platform, he knew this was a great opportunity to approach educational videos differently.
The challenge…create engaging, entertaining educational content that speaks to the BIPOC community they are serving?
Working with the copywriting team at OfColor, we helped conceptualize scripts that not only speak the language of their community but also gave real life examples that actually were relevant in their lives. Our goal was to create engaging videos that felt lively in their visualization, voice, and tone; while also representing the people that looked like our end audience.
We landed on animating these scripts with a highly graphic, collage animation style that felt fresh and on brand opposed to clip art drawings and powerpoint graphs that fill many videos in this sector. Visual themes in the videos included large oversized text, layered textures, cut out imagery, and bold graphics.
Tasked with creating labels for Ville Ferrano's own product line of olive oils and wines, we knew we wanted to do something artful. The inspiration and focus of the labels began with founder Patricia's own painting of their Tuscan countryside.
We reimagined the brand and built a new website for a family-run, historical estate in Tuscany.