As a creative director you need a myriad of things to align to make great work. An awesome client product certainly helps. An awesome product and a good creative process are even sweeter. But if you have both of those things going for you and the client doesn’t trust you you’ll likely end up frustrated, asking yourself “what if” as you close the bar on a Monday night. This is not one of those instances. This is a look at rebranding, through the eyes of the client.

It was in the summer of 2010 that I was introduced to Hiro Leung and Song Kim, owners and operators of Imagin Asia Restaurant Management Group based in Gainesville, Florida. In 2005 they opened Rolls’n Bowls, a restaurant where you can build your own sushi roll or rice bowl. It was met with great success and Hiro and Song realized there was an opportunity for expansion. It was soon after that, that our relationship began.

STEVE: Let’s take a step back in time for a minute. Tell us how the concept of building your own sushi roll came to fruition?

HIRO: It was a typical day at our other restaurant Dragonfly where one or two hour waits were the norm and we would go through crazy amounts of sushi rolls on any given day.  Getting to the restaurant at 10 in the morning and not leaving till midnight was part of our lives. After our busy shifts, we would usually end up eating whatever was left over as our family meal by creating our own roll or bowl. Mostly everything was gone by then so we had to be creative in making what was left into a meal. Ironically, we noticed that what we ate was really good so we opened up our initial QSR (quick service restaurant) concept that revolved around our family meal.  Build your own roll or bowl.

At what point in the restaurant’s existence did you realize that the concept was something special?

We usually travel around the Country looking for inspiration and we realized that we could not find anything like this. Furthermore, we have guests that not only ate our food but also wanted to open up their own store in their hometown.

Rolls’n Bowls was succeeding. Why was there a desire to rebrand the restaurant?

We knew that with the help of a great agency we could take our concept national. It’s like taking something that was good and making it great. The agency was able to tie and strengthen our brand so that we can be ready for our national expansion.

How does a quick service Japanese restaurant in Florida end up hooking-up with a branding agency in Philly?

Before we engaged in a full rebranding, we spent literally half a year looking for the right partners. I love Florida, but I have to say we don’t have the creative talent that other larger cites have and 160over90 was no exception. From the attitude, client experience and creativity we knew 160over90 was the one we wanted to work with. The question was did they want to work for a small growing concept such as ours. We used the beautiful weather and beaches to lure them.

Describe the rebranding process?

The Agency really took a huge dive and studied the market before suggesting any rebranding to us. We appreciated the many hours spent on the discovery process to not only get to know us but to also study the competitive landscape.

Inside Rolls'n Bowls

Getting to know the Rolls'n Bowls staff

Was there anything you were nervous about?

Definitely! We had a restaurant that was already humming and working. We didn’t want the Agency to just rebrand for rebranding sake. We needed them to make our restaurant better. Changing the “identity” was the most nerve racking moment. It had to not only sound right but also capture what we did well and elevate it to another level.

Describe the brand direction you selected. How did you know it was right for you?

The Agency had showed us two great directions, which made the decision very hard but after thinking in terms of which idea had the best long-term direction and the most authentic feel, it was easy.

After the brand direction was established we created a new name for you. Tell us about Yume Ume?

The name fits what we do and it has so much potential. It has subliminal message as well as a strong meaning. Our name is about creativity, fun, unique, fresh and intelligent. In Japanese it means delicious dream.

How would you describe the experience at a Yume Ume? How does the brand direction inform it?

The experience at Yume Ume is about dining out with personal expression focusing on the creative nature of the product. It is organic and illustrative celebrating imagination by highlighting the thrill of great slow food made fast.

What is your favorite piece of brand expression that has been created?

There are so many pieces to choose from but my favorite piece is the copy for our to-go container.  “Let’s go back to…your place”. It is so intimate, fun and emotional. Exactly what dining at Yume Ume is all about!

When is Philly going to get a Yume Ume?

Soon…very soon. If you’re reading this and would like to partner up. Come and check us out!

See more of our Yume Ume work here.

When we set out for our discovery trip to the University of Notre Dame I was curious and skeptical about what we would find out and experience on campus. For a couple of reasons: 1) it is already one of the most recognized university brands in the US and therefore comes by default with a lot of preconceptions and 2) I am always careful when religion gets married with education. Given that and the nature of a discovery I kind of was the devil’s advocate on a Catholic campus.

As strange as it might sound it is not a bad position to be in when you are trying to find out how water proof a concept, philospohy or idea is. If you already bought into something you don’t listen and look as careful as you probably should. But, no risk of that in this case. And that also had a lot to do with the people we interviewed and met with. As with every journey or road trip you’d take you come across things you didn’t expect, which more often than not is what makes it memorable in the end. With universities it’s rarely the beauty of the campus or the advanced labs you might see during a campus tour (although Notre Dame’s campus is cool and the view into the stadium from the press lounge awesome).

Most often it is the stories and people you meet that embody the essence of the brand and bring it to life immediately. In the case of this trip it was definitely the meeting with 94-year-old Father Ted (Rev. Theodore Martin Hesburgh, C.S.C.), former long-time president of the University of Notre Dame, holder of the world record for most honorary doctorate degrees (150) ever awarded to one person, the first figure in higher education to receive the Congressional Gold Medal and the highest civilian honor the Medal of Freedom, former Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, advisor to several US Presidents and a thousand other unbelievable things. Simply put he was one of the most impressive people I ever met for as least as many reasons as he has doctorate degrees.

Especially amongst catholics he is a living legend, one that always fought for a better tomorrow and against the perception that as George Bernard Shaw (founder of the London School of Economics and Nobel Prize winner in literature) once said “a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms.” Father Ted believes “there is no conflict between science and theology except where there is bad science or bad theology.”

With everything he has been involved with, from being appointed by President Eisenhower to the Civil Rights Commission in 1957 and by President Carter to head a delegation of Americans to a global conference on science and technology for development in 1977 to going on a fact-finding tour of refugee camps around Kosovo for the United Nations in 1999 he is the living proof of his and Notre Dame’s philosophy.

Given all the skepticism I had going into this I have to admit that Father Ted was just an extraordinary icing on an amazing cake and the whole team got convinced not only by him but the whole, extremely passionate, welcoming and open-minded community we experienced during our trip. Now our big challenge was to capture everything we learned and to translate that into a Notre Dame undergraduate brand that can convey its story to a variety of different audiences in the most engaging and truthful way. Communicating all the facts, achievements and opportunities, especially to the 16- or 17-year-old high-school student that starts thinking about what they want to do with their lives.

And now, roughly six months later we hold the seminal piece of the new brand in our hands, fresh off the press. I hope this viewbook will inspire and convince the audience as much as we were inspired and convinced. And when it comes to advocating, no question I am now on Notre Dame’s side.

See more work for Notre Dame here.

We’ve added a ton of new work to our main site recently, but one thing that might not be immediately evident is that the site is running on a new content management system (CMS) built with Drupal 7. For years we’d been limping along with a custom-built CMS, but after we built a few Drupal sites we decided it was time to bring that knowledge home.

A Few Goals of the Project:

One CMS for Multiple Sites

Earlier this year we attended An Event Apart Boston, and knew that we needed a radical re-think on our approach to our web work. So when we started mapping out the new CMS we decided that we would not only support our existing Flash site, but build out a mobile site that would allow us to experiment with the latest responsive web design techniques. The end result is a CMS that generates XML feeds for the Flash-capable experience, but detects iOS/Android mobile users and gives them an HTML experience that’s been designed for smaller screens.

Don’t Wait to Get Started: Release, Then Iterate From There

We knew that a fully mobile-first, responsive re-design of the site would take more time than we had, so we decided to do what we could and iterate from there. So: the mobile experience uses Drupal’s Mobile Tools module to funnel mobile users to one of two themes, one for phone-sized devices and one for tablets. We went with separate themes to sidestep the issue of delivering unnecessarily-large images to the smallest screens. We view this as an interim step to something better. The recent responsive redesign of Palantir.net shows that a fully-responsive design can be done in Drupal, so that’s the next step.

A Few Things We Learned:

Drupal 7: A Newscaster Who Sometimes Doesn’t Wear Pants Behind the Desk

Drupal as a CMS consists of core modules, and third-party contributed modules. So while the core modules were ready for primetime and a big improvement over Drupal 6, there were a bunch of third-party modules that were…a little rough around the edges. Metadata for our images was particularly hard to implement, because we were using the Media module that was still in a state of furious development. We also decided not to manage video assets via Drupal, because the support for embedding video directly wasn’t quite there yet. Instead we’re hosting our videos on YouTube, because their entire business is based on making sure video is delivered in the correct format for the user—mobile or otherwise.

We also couldn’t find a good module to translate content to XML feeds for the Flash site, so we wrote custom views to do that instead. Which brings us to the next key learning:

Bring Your Machete

Drupal is remarkably flexible. Part of the price you pay for that flexibility is that the HTML markup it generates is extremely DIV-happy. A single content field could be wrapped in a thicket of DIVs. Towards the end of our project most of our work involved pruning the markup so that we could get it close to what we had in our HTML mockups.

Move in Circles, or: Fingers are Fat

The development cycle for the mobile site was a departure from the conventional design -> build -> ship model of web design. Instead we designed and built the mobile site, then started to test it over the course of several days, using a wide array of devices. You can use mobile device emulators (like the iPhone/iPad Simulator that ships with XCode), but there’s no substitute for testing with a real device. We ended up tweaking a few things with our design (especially for the phone layouts) to accommodate the lower precision of fingers/thumbs. We then implemented those design changes and tested again. The end result was a more organic, iterative process that we’re testing out on projects moving forward.

There is no Finally…

The great thing about releasing something is that it gives you a good marker from which to evaluate things before plunging back in. The mobile version for our site will continue to evolve as we get better at shaping Drupal’s output. It’ll also get better as we slowly integrate the new things we’ve learned in the meantime with respect to adaptive/responsive web design. In the meantime we hope that we’ve improved the experience for our users.

If you’re interested in the latest in adaptive/responsive web design, we highly recommend Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte, and Adaptive Web Design by Aaron Gustafson.

Hang Ten is such a jewel, and was such a force in establishing the action sport counter culture. The brand was there in the beginning for surf, skate, snow, bmx and moto; and played a key role in exposing the sports to the mainstream audience by promoting events and competitions and getting them broadcast on network television (and this was back in the 70′s).

The symbol of hope, carrying over 50 years of brand equity, the Hang Ten FEET are widely recognized around the world. These little feet have an incredible recognition and almost everyone has a positive affinity for them. Some can quite put their finger on it, but they recognize it. Symbolic of the most iconic and stylish surf moves of all time, The feet, they represent both performance and the casual lifestyle. We had to bring them back, treat them with the respect they deserve. Give them a strong identity with a marketing message they can rely on.

Most people we spoke to associated Hang Ten with surf and California culture, but a few remember it as a fashion brand rooted in action sports. But really, it’s all three. Throughout the last two decades, the brand had changed hands multiple times, and has become available in many countries around the globe, each country having it own interpretation of the brand. The authenticity and meaning of the brand was being diluted, yet the notion of it stemming from california remained organically. Hang Ten was in need of focus and an injection of energy. Our job was to bring everything back into focus, and help reposition the brand as an all season brand, embracing multiple action sport cultures, appealing to both a male and female audience.

It can be difficult to describe the feeling of bobbing around in the sun in warm salt water, waiting for the next set to come in. The exercise for Hang Ten made me realize something. Its not the bobbing around in the water, its not flying through trees in fresh powder, its not skating the abandoned pool down the street, its the feeling you get by doing it. Its the good vibe, the relaxed and happy mental state. Vitamin D production promoted by the sun. The feeling you get from the first warm day of spring, the first day you can take off your shoes, and go barefoot.

Its kind of like the scene in “Die Hard” when Bruce Willis takes off his shoes and scrunches the carpet with his toes.

carpet crunch

We all know that feeling. All we needed to do was capture it. The work can be seen here: http://www.160over90.com/hangten.html

Have a good one.

All we had to do was capture the essence of this insanely awesome experience, which resulted in the work you can view here.

At the risk of humble bragging here (or is it old fashioned bragging?), this was the easily the greatest day of work any of us had ever had. The kicker? Our hotel was the site of the third most famous event in human history, the place where Grape Stomp Lady punctured her esophagus:

Unable to resist, our crew of highly trained thespians created the following re-enactment:

Once we arrived at the track, we got much, much, more serious about approaching these finely tuned, hand-built German marvels of engineering. Our automotive muse for this excursion could only be one person.

Compare!

Steve McQueen: A ruggedly handsome, danger-tempting iconoclast who was irresistible to women and a swashbuckling bon vivant that men aspired to be.

Contrast!

Justin LaFontaine: Everything McQueen is, but with a better understanding of kerning.

Our squad of Justin and (from left to right) Kyle Arango, Corey Levin, myself, and Megan Pomplas were ready. Well, most of us were ready; Kyle was equally intent on making his Facebook friends jealous of his jet-setting lifestyle.

Our fleet of vehicles:




Oh wait, that last one is the shitbox that I drive every day.

After a few minutes of instruction, some quality pastries and strong coffee, we hit the road. Kyle and I were partnered up, and we got behind the wheel of the SLS AMG, the gullwinged super car that costs upwards of $200K and has 563 horses sitting under its meticulously sculpted hood. Kyle and I had not been this excited since Bacon Salt was invented. What followed was inspiration for a headline.

Anatomy of a Headline:
Now, we thought we had an understanding of what these cars were, and what driving fast was like, but then you step behind the wheel and are instructed to hit the gas as hard as you can. Within nanoseconds, your heart gets pinned to the back of the leather bucket seat, your head kicks back from the G Forces, and an uncontrollable smile hits your face and laughter takes over. In fact, here’s a ghetto video I took of Kyle’s first run with the SLS (I get too excited and curse in it, so beware):

The resulting headline and spread:

There’s a whole lot of work over at our main site that I’d encourage you to check out. It aims to capture the essence of fun and excitement from the event, where normal folks get to channel their inner Steve McQueen and become as giddy as children on a sugar rush. We hope you enjoy it, cause we sure had a blast making it.

And we can’t thank the people at Mercedes enough for the experience. They were generous and unbelievably accommodating during the trip, and they’ve been a pleasure to work with through our relationship. And with clients like that, you always go the extra mile (per hour?) for them.

It’s been a crazy summer at 160over90. There’s been miles of travel (what’s up Los Angeles, London, South Bend), plenty of fun, and a lot of great work, thinking, and collaboration. But before we leave the dog days of summer behind (it’s been one of the hottest Philadelphia summers on record) we wanted to share some of our most recent client work.

We’ve added 11 new clients to our site and over the next few weeks The Boomerang Table will feature a behind-the-scenes view into the work of each. Get your phones, iPads, and computers ready and let us know what you think.

Mercedes-Benz

University of Notre Dame

Maverik Lacrosse

Michael Ryan Architects

Hang Ten

Yume Ume

Tectron

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Nike Australian Open 2011

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Pirate Surf

A year ago at this time, Kelly Dorsey and I had just completed the first and second Loyola University Maryland search pieces—a two-part direct mail campaign targeted at sophomores and juniors in high school. They hit the mailboxes, and they were successful, and that was great, and we were happy.

But when we were asked to expand the two-part mailer into a four-part series, we were honestly a little worried. Visions of Rocky 3 & 4 (and every other half-baked sequel/ made for TV movie) began to haunt us. Even though the four pieces would be tied together by identical format and materials, we wanted to create something new and unexpected—and to give the reader a glimpse into the school from a completely original angle.

We started Piece Three from a bird’s eye view: deciding that we would focus on campus life, and bring to light the fact that every student has enough activities, tasks, and experiences to keep them busy all four years. At the heart of this idea is the notion that no two people can possibly experience Loyola in the same way—and that’s a good thing.

What resulted was a piece that transitioned from the conversational “Loyola voice” straight into three first-person narratives, written from the point of view of students with vastly different Loyola experiences. Our inspirations were wide: the writing style from those Papercuts ads, the kinetic energy of the Euro trip montage from The Rules of Attraction (minus all the sex and illicit drug use), David Foster Wallace’s use of simultaneous stories and footnotes, and Maira Kalman’s hand-drawn typography.

The manuscript was long and full of blocks of text—but that was the point. We wanted each story to be something that you had to dive into to experience. Something that was so subjective that you couldn’t help but imagine the type of student who would embody this voice and engage in all these activities on campus. Each story was then paired with its own hand-drawn typeface (many hand cramps and late nights later).

Check out some of the pictures of what we came up with, below.  Of course, while this was happening, we were also concepting Piece Four…but we’ll leave that one for another blog post.

Hub Group, a transportation management company (they move large containers of just about everything everywhere) is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. 40 at 40 is an internal campaign that invites Hub employees to nominate co-workers who embody the spirit of the organization. This summer 40 employees will become members of The Hub 40 and be honored with a gift.

In addition to conceiving the initiative we created a promotional poster to be hung at the many Hub offices. We chose to have the piece screen-printed to achieve a gritty, tactile look which to us felt industry appropriate. The numerals in the poster are composed of illustrations of Hub shipping containers. The hexagon shape that contains the ‘at’ is a nod to the Hub logo.

Team:

Creative Director: Stephen Penning
Designers: Mikey Burton, Dan Blackman
Copywriter: Jill Spradely
Production: Ro Fahime, Christopher van Auken
Account: Lindsay Hendler, Meredith Kearney
Printing: Erik Hamline

Here’s the specs for you production geeks:
Quantity produced – 200
Production time – 2 days (not a typo)
Dimensions – 18 x 24
Print Method – Screen Print
Paper Stock – Cougar White 100#
Number of Colors – 4

De’Lognhi has expanded its product offering to include things like food processors, hand blenders and irons. What is great about these products is that their features allow the user to complete tasks with ease and express their creativity. We aimed to capture that idea of expression and possibility with these images.

As excited as I was to experience the festival, I was also eager to see the large format posters 160over90 designed for the event. We’re currently in the middle of various projects for RIT (stay tuned), but these pieces are the first to be unveiled to the public.

RIT is a place for people who want to make things, and make things happen; a university where left and right brain combine to create beautiful solutions that impact the world. Each of our posters shows a chain of consequence from an initial spark of creativity to a final, game-changing result, in areas as diverse as photojournalism, international tourism, and next generation military vehicular engineering. Through bold typography, dramatic imagery and compelling storytelling, these posters held their own inside RIT’s Student Life Center, which was packed with interactive displays and thousands of orange-clad visitors.

While our work signals the introduction of a new visual language for RIT, its celebration of “problem seekers” looking to change the world sat comfortably alongside the hundreds of exhibitions demonstrating how RIT students are re-envisioning the future.