Case Study - HAVEN Lifestyle LLC

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Rebecca McAloon of HAVEN Lifestyle LLC for more than a year now. What originated as a request for business cards and a web site has evolved into the ideal agency/client collaborative relationship. When I describe this relationship as ideal, I mean that throughout this past year of working with HAVEN, we have achieved that wondrous and seamless synergy of ideas, strategy, and execution. K2forma now works with HAVEN to hone their brand, marketing, and we’re about to launch a new ad campaign.

Rebecca approached k2forma last year with a very interesting proposition. She was re-launching her business, a business that had originated in another part of the United States a few years earlier. HAVEN came with a name and a logo, an initial brand strategy, some existing materials, and most important – some good lessons learned. Rebecca new what worked for her company and what didn’t.


Almost immediately we hit on how to take her established brand equity and update it for the new company. The new look captured the spirit of the old and ushered it into the new. The design of the website and subsequent materials came easily. What wasn’t so easy--communicating what HAVEN Lifestyle is all about.

Rebecca’s vision for HAVEN Lifestyle embodies more than just interior design. HAVEN is about living the best quality of life you can, and through good design and organization, this is easily attainable. The emphasis here is on living well. This is a concept that is tricky to communicate.

The challenge for us to resolve; how do we genuinely communicate the depth of HAVEN’s vision and philosophy without it seeming like a ‘new-age’ shtick?

The quality of HAVEN’s work is easily comparable to other designer’s whose priorities are high-end fabrics and designer chandeliers. So, it is important that the communications and materials underscore her talent and education. The language on her site and in her materials really relates to the HAVEN client’s life challenges – big or small. The ‘you just gotta roll with it’ sentiment flows through every aspect of execution. For example, as I write this, Rebecca is in the hospital having her 2nd baby.

This is the perfect HAVEN Lifestyle scenario – ‘what do you do when the company you own is about to kick off a major advertising and promotion campaign, you've got meetings and deadlines, and your baby decides to be born early?' Just roll with it! (Push, Rebecca, PUUUUSH!)



By developing the web site and materials with one eye fixed on design and the other fixed on the humanity, we have found the balance. In this case, both hands are on the steering wheel. The bright color bars used on the site and printed pieces accent the stark black-and-white contrast of the logo, creating a mid-century modern feel that conveys the freshness of HAVEN’s approach. Imagery conveys the unexpected curve balls that life can throw at us, and coupled with the relatable scenarios, it’s easy for the overstressed homeowners to recognize themselves. It’s like an exercise in balancing contrasts, we are charged with creating a brand that conveys high style yet doesn’t alienate those whose focus isn’t on chintz and pillows, but on kids, and games, and work, and soccer, and ballet, and on and on and on.

I was looking through some of the early designs for the HAVEN brand. While some days it seems as though you’re just inching along, it’s exciting to see how sophisticated we have become with this brand…a testament to the ideal synergistic relationship between an agency and client.

The exceptional creative talents of Rebecca and HAVEN Lifestyle are on display at havenlifestyle.com.

P.S., Welcome Cal!

Case Study - Annual Report

24 PAGE ANNUAL REPORT

20 pages + cover, finished size 11 x 8.5", saddle stitch, perf, and insert envelope.

Project beginning - 11/18/07

Project complete - 1/18/08

The Barium Springs Home for Children provides a nurturing place for abused and neglected children to live, early childhood development for low income families, and counseling services and foster family programs.

When k2forma was hired to design the annual report for the Barium Springs Home for Children, I began with a meeting to discuss their needs and existing materials. I learned that the organization was looking to shift the focus away from the sadness of the circumstances of their children and students.

As I began to consider how to approach this project, I was thinking about the seriousness of the circumstances in which these children live. But, no matter what, they are still children - this is their childhood. I remember my favorite thing about being a kid was the delight of imagination -- pretending that those pots and pans really were drums, and I was a really good drummer!

I am a fan of the work of Michel Gondry, and I especially loved his film The Science of Sleep. He successfully explores complex characters with uninhibited imagination. The end result is pure delight. This sense of delight and imagination was my goal for this piece.

As I continued thinking about the joys of being a kid and imagining that your stack of couch cushions is really an impenetrable fort, I began to question what ingredients are necessary to allow for such daydreams. Some of the essentials, are safety, security, and love. Without these things, we're just struggling to survive. When children, have safety, security, and love in their lives, they have the opportunity to daydream. This is exactly what Barium Springs offers - safety, security, love, and most important...hope.

We were all kids at one time, and probably said that we wanted to be astronauts or firefighters when we grew up. These fantastic aspirations were the foundation for this annual report. We utilized the real stories of the children and set them against the backdrop of these fantastic aspirations like 'I want to discover dinosaurs' or 'I want to be a doctor'.

The result of this extreme juxtaposition was to help these children and their stories become more relatable. While we may not have been through the trials that some of these children have been through, we have all daydreamed about becoming the same things.

The result was a lighthearted and hopeful annual report that was also very connected to the seriousness of the work that Barium Springs Home for Children does.

To learn more about Barium Springs Home for Children, visit http://www.bariumsprings.org.

Case Study - Art Book Process

52 PAGE ART BOOK
48 pages plus cover, perfect bound, 8x10" finished size
Project beginning – 2/17/07
Project complete – 11/20/07

(Rough images for blog only.  Final images will appear in Work section of k2forma main site soon.)

‘This [approach] allowed me to organize the images by sensibility rather than date of completion. Ultimately, this was what I wanted to deliver, a challenge to the reader to explore Corey’s work in ways they previously had not.’ 

I met my former professor, Corey Postiglione, in snowy NYC last February (’07) to walk the galleries in Chelsea and enjoy some Indian food. We began discussing his upcoming 30-year retrospective show at the Evanston Arts Center in January 2008. He asked me to design the catalog to accompany the show. Additionally, I was to select the images from his entire body of work that were to be included. It was to be a comprehensive review of his work, but not a monograph. A daunting task, considering that I knew Corey, but was not as familiar with the various status positions of his work, i.e., the important pieces.

I began thinking through the various approaches that I could take with this special project. Initially I thought of organizing the work in a traditional, chronological order. But, I really wanted to deliver something special, something unique for my friend’s investment. As we continued our conversation over the months there were two significantly influential experiences that shaped this process. One was a weeklong workshop at the School of Visual Arts with Milton Glaser that I attended. During that week, I was looking at a book that Milton had put together of his drawings, and talking with him about the process for selecting images and composing the book. He said that in his book, he wanted it to read like music flows. From that discussion, I realized that there was no way I could organize the work in Corey’s book chronologically. I wanted to tell a story with his work.

The second influence in this process was my reading John Berger’s The Shape of a Pocket. In the book is an exchange between Berger and Leon Kossof, discussing the model for his drawings and the relationship that has grown as this model came to his studio day in and day out. This exchange resonated with me because in an earlier conversation, Corey had indicated that his body of work had cycled from abstract to figurative and then back to abstract. I noted that throughout Corey’s body of work, the city of Chicago was a constant and central feature, whether the work was abstract or figurative. Initially, these seem like distant connections. But through this excerpt, I began to see the city in Corey’s work as his model. The entity that inspires, frustrates, and intrigues…just like a model.

A few weeks later, I met with Corey in Chicago to finalize the selected images. It was at this meeting that the concept for his catalog really took shape. We agreed to treat the City like a human model and associated human emotions with his relationship to the City and his body of work. Hence, the Discovery, Intimacy, and Anxiety structure. This allowed me to organize the images by sensibility rather than date of completion. Ultimately, this was what I wanted to deliver, a challenge to the reader to explore Corey’s work in ways they previously had not. I wanted the reader to look past the initial beauty and narrative of the work, and search for an understanding of why certain pieces were grouped together.

The Discovery section of the catalog includes all of the paradigm pieces – sketches or works that launched an entire series, or epiphany pieces – the moment of really seeing something that you’ve been looking at for years. The Intimacy section includes the pieces within a series in which the artist is trying to understand his subject from every possible vantage point. The Anxiety section includes works that are somewhat ominous in narrative and sensibility. There’s a desire with these pieces to recapture that moment of discovery, and a sense of insecurity.

I kept the design minimal, maximized the images and anchored them to the outside edge of the page so that nothing would be lost in the gutter. We used McCoy Silk for the paper to mimic the bright white walls of a gallery. 

I like this book because it is like a portable exhibition of Corey’s work, and I am eternally grateful for his faith in this approach.  

Corey Postiglione - Works on Paper 1972 - 2007 opens on January 13 from 1 - 4 p.m. at the Evanston Art Center.  There will be an Artist Talk at 1:30 p.m.   The exhibit runs through February 17, 2008.

LINKS

Corey Postiglione

Evanston Art Center