Getting asked to do projects that fall outside of our immediate expertise is something that keeps our work interesting here. Thinking back years ago to when I was asked to design my first billboard, I know I was thrilled but also thought, “What the hell do I know about designing a billboard??” And the same went for the first attempt at food packaging, or my first music CD. There are still many common items that I or designSimple have not yet been asked to do. I’ve always wanted to design a beer or wine label — came close several times. And I’d love to design a vinyl album package one of these days… But still, we’ve been lucky in the variety of mediums people have trusted us to work in. Here is a random and hopefully entertaining (it was for us) gathering of some of our design oddballs. —Bill
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JEFFERY BOWMAN is Bingo Boy, Inc. And I’m pretty sure he is the inventor of the phenomenon known as Drag Queen Bingo, which is pretty self-explanatory. There’s food and singing and actual bingo with prizes, and of course some of the more amazing drag queens you will ever meet hosting the event, usually along with Bingo Boy himself. It’s not to be missed. We’ve helped Mr. Bowman from time to time with branding, web and marketing projects. But this is the first and only board game we’ve ever gotten to do. I shot a bunch of studio pics of the game and cards, etc… but the photos Jeffery had on his Legendary Bingo website were more fun, so we “borrowed” some. Hope that’s okay.
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NAAMA KATES is a talented musician and vocalist and we were excited to give her second album a visual identity. After listening to the tracks a few times and thinking about the title, I came up with the visual double entendre of the bottle cap and crown. This was not our first CD package, and I was eager to do more for other artists but… Napster, iPods and you know the rest.
SPEAKING OF Naama Kates, she must have liked the CD because years later we got to design a poster for her film Sorceress. We did two but this version was used for most of the marketing of the film. A few years later I saw a poster for another horror film that was suspiciously similar to our poster. I’m not saying that I’m the only person who’s looked up through branches and imagined things, but suspiciously similar, just saying.
HOW MANY luggage tags have I designed? Believe it or not, several I think. But this is the only one I’m proud of. It was for Millipore a company making medical testing equipment. Millipore wanted an image of a cell, but they had a cartoon version in mind. The printer I was working with suggested a lenticular, aka a “blinky,” which was when I knew it should be an actual microscopic image of a cell. The client loved it.
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OH, LOOK, another CD package. This one for music publisher Majorsongs. It’s a sampler of their catalog of songwriting legend Carl Sigman. There are three CDs and a booklet and the artwork is taken from Carl Sigman’s published sheet music from the ’50s and ’60s. It’s maybe a stretch to include CD packaging in our Cabinet of Curiosities. We’ve done over a dozen CDs and for a second it looked like they might be a regular thing for us, but I’m gonna keep em here because they’re kind of a dead medium for now, at least until a virus knocks out all of the satellites or something.
I WISH I could find an example of the candy bar label I made. I called it a Choco-Watt bar because it was Hershey’s chocolate and we made them for the marketing of a music festival in Los Angeles. We gave away thousands but after the event there were still boxes and boxes leftover, which was the plan all along. 🙂
But on occasion we do get to make food labels and packages, and that’s a nice break for us. Here are a few examples.
» The first is a marmalade label for our friends at Arlington Garden Pasadena.
» Second is a special blend of green tea that was brought from Kagoshima, Japan, and used for a tea ceremony event.
» The third is a cheat because it’s not really for designSimple, it’s quickie packaging that we make every year for various concoctions — marmalade, syrups, candies — that we make from the abundance of citrus trees here. We brand them Doctor Hindry, a fictitious character named after the property, and give them away to friends and family.
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