Yellowbird Hot Dip

November 28, 2021

Yellowbird Hot Dip

In the summer of 2020, Yellowbird Foods made its dip debut at Whole Foods Market nationwide. Made with 100% organic ingredients, Hot Dip’s visual identity took a lot of cues from the Yellowbird’s Whole30-approved organic sauce line that launched early 2019. With illustrations of fresh garden veggies and vibrant colors that pop right off the shelf, Hot Dip is the perfect addition to the nest.

To learn more about the process of this project, you can access my blog entry here: Branding a Product Line

My team focused heavily on the journey our condiments take: from the pepper farm, to our kitchen in beautiful San Marcos, straight to your Friday night feast. Hot Dip’s illustrative direction is primarily inspired by floral prints found on oilcloth. We champion anything that encourages us to play with our food — no matter how messy we get.

Our illustrations are brought to life by a key component of our brand identity: color. Much like our other sauces, color acts to differentiate different flavors of dip. Hot Dip utilizes a mostly-monochromatic, surrealist approach to color. The ingredient illustrations harmonize with the background’s overarching color; however, the radiant leaves interrupt the monotonous monochrome with sparks of unexpected contrasting hues inspired by Sandy Skoglund’s A Breeze at Work (1987). This adds a visual interest that would be lacking otherwise.

We complimented our lush illustrations and unexpected color palette typographically with heavier letter forms as a reference to the thick, rich consistency of the dip.

Compositionally, we were driven by the cyclical form of our dip container and used it as a method of story-telling. The lid has a border of fiery ingredients arranged in a circle to reflect on our commitment to holistic and clean nutrition. The Bird peaks out from his garden of fiery produce to challenge our Flock to think beyond the chip. Hot Dip is a journey. Once you buy it, you embark on an experience that’s hotter than a pedicab seat on a summer day. When you open your first tub of Hot Dip, the inside lid surprises you with a literal wave of flavor. It encourages you to dip, dunk, and drench any food to make it infinitely yummier. Make sure to put down an oilcloth — things are going to get messy.

BLOG POST

Want to know more about this project?

For additional animations, web content, and more insight detailing my design thinking, visit my blog post, “Branding a Product Line.”

The Enterprise Center

June 16, 2021

The Enterprise Center

The Enterprise Center is a Philadelphia-based not-for-profit that supports minority entrepreneurs and under-resourced communities by advising and delivering on transformative economic development connected to minority business growth cycles and community wealth-building initiatives. Their work for communities in the Philadelphia area is crucial—especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Enterprise Center was looking for a visual designer to help establish a cohesive brand identity in preparation for their upcoming website redesign.

In the past, they’ve had a number of freelance designers help them layout reports and advertising collateral with entirely different styles. Early on, I put together an audit of all design collateral the organization had commissioned over the past two years and tracked what colors, typefaces, and motifs were used, along with their frequency. Once I pulled that data together, I was able to work with The Enterprise Center’s stakeholders and decide how they wanted to represent themselves. The design directive the organization settled on was something modern, clean, and vibrant. The Philadelphia community is artistic and full of life, and they should represent the community they serve.

Color plays a huge role in The Enterprise Center’s brand identity. It works to distinguish the different facets of the brand, while also speaking to its roots within the Philadelphia community.

The finalized brand identity is clean, modern, and trustworthy. The Enterprise Center is organizationally broken up into three pillars: Business, Capital, and Community. Its color palette helps speak to this distinction. As a whole, The Enterprise Center is represented in its core blue hues. The Business pillar is represented by orange accents, Capital by green, and Community by teal. The color palette derives inspiration from the Philadelphia community with each proprietary color named appropriately. Aside from color, I wanted to also create a fun textural element the brand could use as a way to activate background space and add visual interest. The official pattern was inspired by Art Deco prints and was created by outlining the logomark.

The brand’s streamlined typography is both borrowed and improved. Its primary typeface is Univers, 59 Ultra Condensed—pulled directly from its logotype. I added Kulturista, a slab-serif, as the secondary typeface as a way to contrast the clean modern structure of Univers’s modern letterforms. Not only that, Philadelphia has a deep-rooted history with the printing press, and I felt incorporating a slab-serif would be an excellent way to imbue a sense of community within the brand design.

“Like many small businesses and nonprofits, it had been years since we gave our branding guide the attention it deserved, and increasingly, it was starting to show… Theresa was amazing to work with: she truly took the time to understand our needs, our goals, and our identity, and she used that to develop a branding guide that provides a strong foundation for both our physical and our digital collateral… The agencies we work with appreciate (the branding), too: I constantly get compliments on how easy it is to produce content for us because they’re able to start with Theresa’s clear, comprehensive guide! Whether your brand is due for a refresh, or you’ve never formally had one completed, I promise that you will be pleased with Theresa’s work!”

—Elizabeth McGinsky, The Enterprise Center

While I prepared the official brand guidelines for The Enterprise Center, I also worked to create several examples of collateral. I included them as examples of the extended brand system—making sure to account for both the digital and print landscape. Once stakeholders had a chance to review, they requested some of the design collateral previewed in the brand guidelines document. In addition to the completed brand guidelines and prepared assets, I also developed letterhead and business card templates, a PowerPoint template, and Zoom backgrounds.

By the end of the project, the team was delighted with their new brand standards and excited to use them moving forward.

Michael Graves Design

September 17, 2020

Michael Graves Design

Michael Graves Design is the official retail line of Michael Graves Architecture & Design products. During my time at MGA&D, I worked to rebrand the product line by creating a new logo, modernizing the touchpoint collateral, and designing the outdoor signage.

The new identity is influenced by the stacked letterforms in the logo. In the past, the logotype was laid out placing the most importance on the name “Michael Graves” with “Design” secondary. This new logo brings all elements up in scale to communicate that the name is just as important as the work it does.

This modern typographic approach in Gotham Bold extends into the touchpoint collateral to further solidify the identity. Bold knock-out type sits on a vibrant new color palette that echoes the hues and tones Michael Graves was famous for using in his Post-Modern architecture.

A brand identity that communicates a famous name is just as important as the design it delivers.

The system is made up of Agenda booklets for client meetings, notebooks for brainstorming sessions, a guide to Princeton, NJ for those staying overnight, and a thank you postcard.

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