Do-Gooding Good Cookies

My friend Jacqui Farina had been a board member and volunteer with Project Angel Food for some time. She called me about an idea she had to create a line of cookies for them and if I would design the brand/packaging for it.

In case you're not aware of Project Angel Food, they cook & deliver more than 13,000 meals a week to men, women and children affected by HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life threatening illnesses. They have their own kitchens here in LA where they create all these meals.

So, the idea of taking a charity bake sale concept to a "Newman's Own" type business model seemed like a total "no-brainer". Needless to say, I said yes.

I started with the understanding that the product line would be positioned as a more giftable gourmet market item vs a mass "chips-ahoy" snack product. Not only because of the price point and quality of the product but to speak to a generally more affluent and/or charitable consumer familiar with Project Angel Food.

With the sub-brand name "Project Angel Food Bakers" we all agreed on, I kept the logo design as close to the organizations branding as possible to ensure the highest brand recognition. The PAFB brand's visual differentiation would be in the execution of other elements.

When eating a cookie all you really care about is if it tastes good. I put together the idea of how much good each cookie sold could do with how good the cookie tastes and came up with "the do-gooding good cookie".

The playfulness of the name felt particularly right for communicating the overall mission of bringing a smile and well-being to people in need and absolve the cookie eater of any quilt for eating as much as they can.

Angel imagery is obviously important to the existing PAF brand. Showing the goodness of the cookie and visually tying it to the charity's brand became clear... make the cookie an angel. Adding the halo helped to focus the idea on "goodness" vs a cookie that just died and went to heaven (no matter how accurate that may be once you bite into one).

Keeping the palette softly bright and most elements white helped keep the mood happy as well as allow the blue logo and the cookie to stand out.

The Do-gooding Good Cookies premier this week, with 100 percent of the purchase price being donated directly back to support Project Angel Food's life-saving meal service in a partnership with Pavilions stores.



Please, check out Project Angel Food's site for more info or to volunteer at www.angelfood.org.

Exotic

Dayna Decker is probably best known for her wood wick candles. Her collections of home fragrance products are in high-end retail shops around the world. You can check out Daynadecker.com if you would like to know more.

This past spring and summer, I designed a variety of product packaging/branding and re-branding for Dayna. The products are in the same category as Agraria, shown on this blog, but the brand is very different as you can see. Dayna's brand style is more modern, clean, and restrained.

I designed the Exotic collection packaging featuring a matte black stock with high-gloss silhouetted floral photography to compliment the previous collections and celebrate the rich and moodier fragrances.

Branding Bath

Back in 2009, I had redesigned and overhauled Agraria San Francisco's bath line. They had various products in this category but each item seemed like an "add-on" with the logo slapped on as the cohesive branding. I'm the first to support proper exploitation of a brands logo, however the idea of "branding" is so much more. It's a point of view, an approach, a delicate infusion of shape, color, proportion to form identity.

The existing bottle (shown here, inset) was/is a nice squared shape. This bottle is the same bottle that Apothia uses in their bath line (shown). Apothia's bottle looks much better because there branding works well with the shape. The better quality cap helps a lot too. For Agraria, it's "ok" but not a perfect fit with its more classical personality. For a company with a traditional luxury position this was not good enough.

In redesigning Agraria's overall branding, I had focused on the concept of 8 core fragrances. This idea took the form of an octagon repeated in various forms... as a label shape or an element in a pattern. For the bath line, the octagon manifested as a tall bottle shape, short bottle and hand soap bar with slightly different yet cohesive forms.

An Eye on the Forest

I occasionally sit-down and create a "Portfolio Cheat-Sheet" as shown above. A single page of various cropped thumbnails of my design/illustration/product work that will usually accompany a resumé or go to a client for a quick visual reference.

I've never really been a designer that focused on one style or genre (perhaps supporting my abject obscurity), but find inspiration in variance. If you poke around this blog a bit, you'll see I have worked in a variety of industries that are seemingly quite disparate.

Because of the variety of projects, I find it a good exercise to thumbnail the work to gauge where I am leaning stylistically at a given moment. Work that has just been completed, mixed with the past helps me to see the "common threads" as well as where I may want to go next.

Cropping the images, aside from just arousing inquiry, helps to keep anyone from focusing too much on what the object is verses "reading" the visual "feel". In other words... something like not focusing on the trees, but to see the forest more clearly.

-rm

Charlotte Moss

Following the success of the Michael S Smith Collection (see post Agraria 1.), I had designed a home fragrance collection for interior designer Charlotte Moss.

I wanted this collection to be a real departure from Agraria's more masculine aesthetic. Primarily because of Charlotte's trademark feminine style, a desire to exercise my love of 18th century decorative arts, and not since working on Barbie have I been able to revel in the world of "pretty" in such a satisfying way. Oh, btw, the pink is for the peppercorn in the fragrance...I swear, nothing to do with Barbie.

Shown above is Left Bank Perfumed Candle, AirEssence, and votive candle trio in a photo by Elio Tolot whom I worked with on all Agraria photography. This is one of two fragrance collections that was created for Charlotte.

As on all things Agraria, my role was "soup to nuts"... all details of concept, product definition, packaging, collateral, photo art direction, styling, etc.

-rm

photo: Elio Tolot

Perfumed Tassels

Product and Packaging Design

Agraria 1. The Beginning

In 2006 I took on a new client, Agraria San Francisco. My relationship with Agraria lasted about 3 years so I feel I need to give a little background before posting what is a large body of work created for them.

Agraria is a luxury home fragrance company probably best known for their potpourri, diffuser oils (AirEssence) and perfumed candles. The company was founded by Stanford Stevenson and Maurice Gibson in 1969 and they sold products exclusively in their Nob Hill shop, but in the 70's expanded to stores like Henri Bendel and Bergdorf Goodman in New York.

In addition to the enthusiasm toward the unique and rich fragrances, the founders were so particular about to-whom and where they sold their products that over the years it stayed a bit of a "well kept secret" for the Park Avenue crowd. The current owners purchased the company in 2004 and quickly re-branded, added some new products and went about building the business and maintaining their luxury status.

When I met Agraria, they did not have any in-house design or creative direction for the brand. The new owners were not from creative backgrounds as the founders had been so they commissioned a design firm to create the re-brand in 2004/5 and Agraria was managing the brand but was understandably struggling with brand extensions and creation and integration of new concepts.

In 2006 Agraria commissioned me to design packaging for a new line of products for interior designer Michael S. Smith. Having just read his book "Elements of Style" I was excited to do the project.

Some work had begun on the product definition so I focused on packaging but stayed close to Agraria's existing package structures and formats. I stuck to the format not only to save money but to maintain some visual brand connection while allowing the line to be independent. It was Agraria's first co-branding venture and the launch was very successful.

Following this project I would then design three other product lines for them in addition to an overhaul of the website. I was then asked if I would join them on staff and in June of 2007 I became Agraria's Executive Creative Director.

-rm