GROW / Blog

Last night, I gave a presentation to the Richmond chapter of AIGA entitled “Enabling Interactivity”.  The presentation aimed to share insight on the tools and practices Grow utilizes to help ensure the smooth execution of complex digital initiatives.  Here are the slides from that presentation.

Download: Enabling Interactivity PDF

In lieu of fruitcake or an elaborate promotional website (ahem, up for FWA People’s Choice), our gift to you this holiday season is a collection of 40 iPhone wallpapers sure to suit any taste.  Grab them individually or as a whole set.  Enjoy!

On our Thank You Begins With A T site, developer Josh drew a marker and an envelope. Astute visitors pieced together that they could draw on Josh and e-mail him copies of their creations.  Thousands of drawings flooded Josh’s inbox, and the rest of our team followed along with an RSS feed.  Many of the drawings were too good to keep to ourselves, so we’re happy to share this compilation of our favorites.  As a disclaimer, web users given a pen and freedom of expression will frequently draw genitalia.

Want to win a shirt from the site?  Leave a comment, and we’ll pick three random winners next week.

We were published in the latest PRINT Regional Design Annual (Dec ‘09) for our identity system. Since we don’t write a lot of letters, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll never see our identity system in person.  So what better place to show you some more detail than on our blog?

We spend most of our time in the digital world, so the Grow identity gave us a nice chance to work with a natural, homespun kind of feel. That’s why we loved the idea of hand drawn patterns and customizable iconography.

Each employee receives business card labels with his or her own custom icon.  The labels attach to any of the cards printed with 6 different patterns in 3 colors.

The envelopes match the same way. They come in 3 colors with 6 patterns printed on the interior, and each is affixed with an icon-specific address label.

To keep the look and feel of the identity consistent, we use the pattern on everything from our website to the tags on our Thank You campaign t-shirts. The stationery and template also make their way into our presentations and pitches.

The upcoming issue of .net Magazine (Issue 193, September 2009) features insight from our Sr. Art Director, Joe Branton.  The article is part of .net’s “Makeover” feature, in which prominent designers are asked to redesign a lackluster site—in this case an online vodka retailer called Vodka Emporium.  You can check out the article here.  And since you don’t get to see the real of the quality of Joe’s work, we also wanted to share full resolution images of the designs.  Click the thumbnails below to view the work.

I’m so excited to finally see our K-Y Intense collaboration with Mother New York go live! Just for kicks, I went through my sketches of the reaction room to see how close my original drawing compared to the final composition. I was both surprised and delighted that they were remarkably close. It just goes to show you that drawing your ideas out on paper before putting them into Photoshop is the best way to avoid making critical mistakes and help get your head wrapped around a project before even hopping on the computer! If you haven’t seen the live site, visit it at the K-Y Intense Satisfaction Lab, and enjoy a laugh or three.