it’s hard to believe we’re actually moving into december already! this week, i’m really looking forward to this bookmaking for adults at 826LA, followed by the first colLAboration event on site at golden road brewery, followed yet still by a holiday open house & sale at peter shire studio. maybe after all that, i’ll need the sunday sound bath at yogala!
if you’re all jazzed about cyber monday, there are things you can click on and buy in this store right here.
Salon of Beauty from Mark & Angela Walley on Vimeo.
alissa walker also wrote about this piece for fastcodesign.com.
speaking of things los angeles, there’s a walk from hollywood to the beach on november 19!
and if you’re in echo park, echoparknow.com has a run-down of thanksgiving volunteer opportunities coming your way.
unrelatedly, did you know david lynch has a new nightclub? he does! meet the designer behind david lynch’s new nightclub [yes nightclub].
with thanksgiving around the corner, you might want to start giving thanks to family, friends and clients. craft magazine has a nice write-up on these letterpress fill-in thanksgiving cards.
looking further into the future, if you’re a calendar-o-phile, you might like this 2012 calendar preview from feltandwire.com.
for now, though, we’re talking pumpkins, as part of the seasonal eats guide and over on LAist: seasonal eats: get pumped about pumpkins. get yourself a delicious cinderella pumpkin and get to work!
1. go to the contact form.
2. enter your contact information, mailing address and write “i’d like a free seasonal eats guide!”
3. watch your mailbox for its arrival.
the parlato design studio seasonal eats recipe guide has 9 delicious, seasonal, local, healthy recipes for thanksgiving, all with online breakdowns, suggested alternates and vegan options. so far we’ve covered the apple cherry galette and the apple, celery, lemony yogurt slaw. more to come as we countdown to thanksgiving.
We recently gave Tony’s Darts Away a little makeover online and wanted to share it with you. If you’re familiar with the All Craft, All Draught, All California bar in Burbank, you know they’ve been making a name for themselves as celebrationists of some of the finest California craft beer. Before we even got involved, LA weekly cited their site in a top 5 of LA restaurants others could learn from, so we wanted to keep it as accessible and informative as it’s always been, with more muscle on the back end and make it more easily expandable as their web presence grows. Their contact info & hours are built into every page, their site pages have been sorted into simple main categories, and we’re porting tweets into a sidebar so they can announce events and late keg tappings after opening.
Similar to what we did for Mohawk Bend, we gave Tony’s Darts Away an interactive beer list to make browsing, searching and sorting easy. On the back end, this list is easy for employees to manage and update, so the menu stays updated all the time.
Something unique that has garnered this site some attention is the beer styles library where visitors can research and read tasting notes and anecdotes on all kinds of craft beer styles they might encounter at Tony’s and beyond. Click a style in the sidebar and the text loads in the center. We also set up the brewers list the same way, so if you’re curious who’s who and what’s what, take a look!
Finally, we did some streamlining to their menu workflow, to integrate menu layouts that allow for styled updates they can print as needed and then paste right into wordpress. The main idea here is, we want to make it easy for them to get done with setup and serve us all some beer, which is exactly what will happen if you drop into Tony’s. Visit the full site: tonys.la
+ Read more case studies here.
+ See more of our work for tony’s pubs.
join the LA design community tuesday, october 25 at mohawk bend for the behance / AIGA october 2011 meetup! i’ll be there, LA-area members of behance and members of AIGA los angeles will all be there, mixing up & hanging out. come on down!
design week is actually here! after scouring the list, i think i’m going to head over to mid-wilshire and check out A+D’s eames designs exhibit, CAFAM’s the golden state of craft and LACMA’s california design: living in a modern way. then some other time this week, up to pasadena to the norton simon museum for proof: the rise of printmaking in southern california and the original print: an introduction to printmaking in the postwar period. sounds like a super week of design history & celebration!
this past sunday, we rode in the 3rd cicLAvia event in los angeles—this time with a longer route covering 10 miles of car-free streets. cyclists, families, roller-bladers, skaters, runners, walkers, and stroller-pushers alike came out to enjoy the gorgeous fall-in-LA day. we started out on a new leg of the route, extending up to cesar chavez & main streets, so our first views were of the outstanding crowd of people and tents at the occupy LA protest.
we headed east toward hollenbeck park. the views from 4th street bridge were amazing in all directions. a few days after a day of rain, and los angeles cleans up nicely!
we were curious to see the new leg of the route extending into south LA to the coca-cola bottling plant and the african american firefighter museum. the ride down went past the old central market, by lots of music, fresh coconuts and taco stands, down to the bottling plant at 14th street, where coca-cola had set up a booth and was showcasing all their new drinks. we took some shots of sucralose in the form of coke zero [pretty good, if i drank soda] and powerade [it’s what plants crave, and it’s gross!] and headed into the museum.
this fire wagon was quite a relic of history. i’m not sure how it was pulled, and i’m not sure how many successful fires it put out, but it sure is sweet.
heading back through downtown, i never get tired of shots of LA filled with bikes.
there was strong support for occupy LA throughout the ride, whether they were protesters who joined in, or riders who wore supportive signs. this 1% guy cracked me up.
on our way back from the east hollywood / LACC end of the route, i was riding under the northbound 101 overpass when i noticed this really slow sunday traffic in the southbound direction. though the cars are somewhat hard to see, it was an impactful reminder of what we’re trying to leave behind, and what we’re trying to create with awareness events like cicLAvia. keep riding, everyone!
this week we’re looking at branding from the home team: the whole story behind building a brand & identity for mohawk bend!
take a look into one type designer’s process on the making of a new serif face from i love typography: FF tundra
some sneak peaks on the new book from studio on fire, the cover printing of their new book iron beasts make great beauty. how cool to be able to print the cover of a book on your work!
my friend, illustrator shiho nakaza, is doing a cool sketch series on LA food trucks. check out her food trucks blog tag to see the series.
thanks to echo park now for culling all the echo park listings from LA weekly’s best of LA issue. echo park rocks!
As the saying goes, I love it when a plan comes together. When I first talked to Tony Yanow about his newest venture, Mohawk Bend, it was nearly a year ago, midway through the Ramona Theater’s renovation process. While we’d be working from scratch design-wise, Tony had a very clear idea of who he was serving and what the attitude and voice of Mohawk Bend would be, which made the preliminary research and brand brief development really easy. He also had an interior design team working with the raw materials of the space and adding beautiful custom furniture in light wood and warm, orange tones. From the outset, we knew the setting of where the identity would live and how we could make it stand out appropriately within that environment.
Mohawk Bend has a few different areas of focus, but it’s first and foremost a celebration of craft beer from all over California. The most exciting and innovative of these is the hops-forward west coast IPA, and in that vein, the hop flower became a main feature of the logo.
Beyond beer, though, their plans included California-sourced spirits, a bottle-free selection of California wine, local / organic food that spans the vegan-omnivore spectrum, and a low-waste operation in the kitchen. Tony really wanted an icon system that could represent each of these aspects and work interchangeably with the main identity, play out on the web site, and associate with core staff’s areas of expertise. We developed a color palette and selection of icons that swap out with the hop flower in the logo for specialized uses, and become indicators for each area of the web site. For future signage and events, they’ll have the versatility of growing this icon system with new developments.
Creating the web site was a fun exercise in brainstorming all the things we hate about restaurant web sites and putting them at the top of the list of what not to do. No flash, No pdf menus, No hard-to-find location information. Tony was always very clear about the voice of Mohawk Bend, that it’s craft first in a simple and honest way. We were still excited to talk about all the great things Mohawk Bend does, however, so we built all of it into the about section, so the information is there without being an obstacle on the home page. Instead, a styled twitter widget announces daily specials and events, with clear postings of hours, location, directions and a list of menus: get the info you need and come on over!
One particularly fun feature is the interactive beer list. During our preliminary talks on functionality of the site, Tony said “What I’d really like to have is a beer list you can sort by any category—brewery, style, alcohol volume…” And so we thought about it, and worked out a solution that integrates directly with WordPress, allowing all the searching & sorting a curious beerophile would want. Click any column header to sort by that column, or use the search field to isolate beers containing your search terms. We also translated everything to a nice mobile site, so anyone can find just what they’re looking for [even search the beer list] on the go.
Behind the scenes was the real challenge: developing a workflow system that would allow daily menu updates in print and online to be done easily and quickly by employees. A system that still uses nice typefaces and formatting in print, but doesn’t require any coding online—and all simple enough to execute well without a design education. Once we settled on a menu format, we built in-house layout templates using paragraph styles that would transfer heading tags and basic bold and italic formatting to WordPress. The WordPress interface is extremely user-friendly, with a visual editor, so everyone has taken to it quickly. To keep the carbon footprint low, the menus are printed on Neenah Environment 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.
As I’ve watched this roll out in action and seen the Mohawk Bend staff make it their own, I’m proud of the system we created together. They’ve been able to switch around the menu formats easily using feedback from customers, and we’ve been able to build more of the identity into ads, stickers, signage and support collateral. Best of all, they are all super-nice people to work with, so we’re always happy to walk down, have a beer, find out how everything is going, and help them work out their next adventure. Bottoms-up to Mohawk Bend!
+ Read more case studies here.
+ See more of our work for Mohawk Bend here.
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