Delicate, Organic, Homemade

By on November 26, 2012

Fuse is branch­ing from sketches into com­po­si­tion. There are a lot of things going through my head while draw­ing the pos­si­ble exis­tences of this project that are dis­played here. One, it seems nat­ural for the prod­uct name to be a word­mark or logo­type instead of a con­joined graphic and typo­graphic treat­ment. Fuse is a sim­ple four let­ter word, and it can pretty much do every­thing it needs to in terms of char­ac­ter within the sculp­tural aspect of its typog­ra­phy. Two, I have bat­tled between a strong and con­tained form vs one with more breath and flu­id­ity. I want to avoid Fuse appear­ing girly or unso­phis­ti­cated, but I feel like the thick/thin line qual­ity of the organic route cap­tures the brand more potently.

I come to this road­block often when work­ing on this blog. For a pas­time, brand­ing isn’t exactly the most for­giv­ing activ­ity if you want to see the final prod­uct in motion. I can’t pur­chase and repaint model train set models—although good type­faces are always a bonus. Brand­ing lives out­side in the world, in the minds of an audi­ence, tar­get or user. How they inter­act and respond to the graph­ics built into the visual iden­tity of a brand is where a brand really begins to live. In the case of Fuse, as a pet project itself of home­made infused vod­kas, the brand is really bound to the whims of its maker, and cap­tur­ing the essence of what’s inside the bot­tle. If you’ll par­don the romance, what’s in the bot­tle is heart.



I called this part of the process a road­block because what my heart wants to do is apply the logo in white vinyl to the face of the bot­tle, giv­ing it con­trast and illu­mi­nat­ing the face of the bot­tle with some char­ac­ter­is­tic typog­ra­phy. That would require die cut­ting how­ever, and though that can be a lit­tle expen­sive, it’s also dif­fi­cult to achieve with such thin lines. I’ve even con­sid­ered pur­chas­ing a die cut­ting machine to help with sim­i­lar projects in the future, but for now I have to con­sider how the word­mark will live on the face of the bot­tle with­out it. Fur­ther­more, there’s an oppor­tu­nity to con­sider about dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing the prod­uct by fla­vor­ing. Since Fuse in an ever-growing and chang­ing process (this month it’s car­damom, next month, tan­ger­ine), a form of mod­u­lar label might be appro­pri­ate. Per­haps it’s a mat­ter of writ­ing in the fla­vor that month, with the hope that the writ­ing can be rewrit­ten, erased, or applied again in some fash­ion.
Those are my devel­op­ments this week. If any­one out there has a die cut­ter or opin­ions about rent­ing or own­ing one, let me know! Is it worth it? What are the best man­u­fac­tur­ers? Can you die cut metal or balsa wood??

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Get Crackin’

By on November 16, 2012

Fuse is the name I’ve given to the prod­uct of my home­made infused vod­kas. Now, lots of peo­ple do this; they doc­tor their own spir­its with a lit­tle lemon or frozen blue­ber­ries or some­thing cute. Mine’s noth­ing less DIY or crafty unfor­tu­nately. There’s lit­tle that makes it a true prod­uct (alas I am tempted to set up a still in my stu­dio, but that might not go over well with the room­mate). I take on this pas­time because I got bored with tonic water and needed a stim­u­lus from dry mar­ti­nis. It also becomes a con­ver­sa­tion with fel­low imbibers, usu­ally descend­ing into sub­jec­tive dif­fer­ences, but all the more fun. It can also enter­tain as a sci­ence exper­i­ment; it’s fun to find just the right for­mula that’s right for a cin­na­mon cock­tail, or decide finally that no such thing should exist. Any way you cut it though, home­made vodka infu­sions are noth­ing new, they are sim­ply a hobby. But how we go about our hob­bies I think is the true iden­tity. It’s an exten­sion of our work, life and meth­ods, and within that lies unique­ness, and within unique­ness lies poten­tial for identity.


The beauty of this brand is that it’s not some­thing that needs to com­pete in the mar­ket­place, it’s not some­thing that needs to impress a gigan­tic body of tar­get indi­vid­u­als, it’s not some­thing that needs to fit in. It reminds me a lot of attempt­ing to build an iden­tity for the home owned by fam­ily friends of mine in Ore­gon which I com­pleted recently here at Monthly Brand. It isn’t a cor­po­rate busi­ness, it’s a name tag. At most it is most enjoyed by a friend if I give it to them as a gift. It’s not meant to rake in cap­i­tal, it’s not meant to sit on bar shelves, it’s mostly for me and my friends and fam­ily to sit around and appre­ci­ate the time and love put into it. It feels even more spe­cial since it is a prod­uct that takes time. I could eas­ily be doing an iden­tity for your grandmother’s bake sale (though she’d prob­a­bly be mak­ing more money than I am with Fuse).



I just think that’s an impor­tant thing to remem­ber because as I begin sketch­ing logos for Fuse, it starts to appear a lit­tle cor­po­rate, even if edgy in the indus­try of spir­its. It’s still look­ing like some sophis­ti­cated dis­tillery in the Ger­many or something—less like the soft hands of a Brook­lynite graphic designer. The prod­uct isn’t the thing. The pro­ducer is the thing. In this case, you and I could both infuse vodka with, let’s say, star anise. After bot­tling and stor­ing and open­ing up our con­tain­ers of vodka and star anise 12 days later, you and I would have pretty much the same prod­uct. It’s a bake sale, but it doesn’t have to be dull, it’s how I make it dif­fer­ent from you, my per­son­al­ity, and how I use it that makes it Fuse and not yours.


That said, it’s worth think­ing about the prod­uct, what it is, the act of infu­sion, the process that is tak­ing place that trans­forms one sub­stance into…well…the same sub­stance that tastes a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Fuse comes from infu­sion, but it’s inter­est­ing how the word also implies that it brings things together, it glues things. I am reminded of bub­bles when they com­bine together, and how their shared walls make incred­i­bly flat polyg­o­nal shapes. I’m reminded of hexa­gons and poly­gons as well because of chem­i­cal bonds, and how the prod­uct truly is a sci­ence exper­i­ment (albeit incred­i­bly rudi­men­tary) at the end of the day. Fuse is also the name of a resis­tor in elec­tron­ics to pre­vent surges; it’s a fail­safe, which con­jures an inter­est­ing con­nec­tion between liquor and food, or liquor and hav­ing a good time tonight.

It’s clear from my inspi­ra­tion board here, and ones in the past, that I’m a lit­tle obsessed with dia­grams. I’m not really sure why but I always feel the need to include lines and let­ters and shapes that detail a process or how some­thing works. Per­haps a part of me enjoys the sci­en­tific illus­tra­tions a bit more than the sci­ence behind the mean­ing of that con­tent. Photo imagery is some­times help­ful too, but it never quite knocks it out of the park for me in terms of aes­thetic attrac­tion. If this is a project for me, this infused vodka, I think I may have to indulge on some of these per­sonal styles.

Regard­less, there are a lot of themes I’m using so far within the con­text of what Fuse actu­ally is rather than my per­sonal impres­sion of it as an iden­tity. As I men­tioned, the cell walls of bub­bles, chem­i­cal illus­tra­tion and dia­grams, the fil­tra­tion and infu­sion processes as graphic rep­re­sen­ta­tions, let­ter com­bi­na­tions as insin­u­a­tion of “fus­ing”, and an expres­sion of expan­sion or dis­tri­b­u­tion. All these are inter­est­ing ideas, and I hope they’ll lay a bedrock for what seems to me to be the most impor­tant part: I’ve got to like the look of it if I want to drink it. Spir­its of any kind more often need to feel easy, not com­pli­cated or harsh. Some spir­its, like beer, can get away with loud designs, they’re look­ing for their tar­gets to be rowdy on occa­sion. I’m not sure Fuse is the same in that respect. It’s a more patient iden­tity. Patience inspires class, and class inspires taste, and hope­fully, Fuse is all about taste.

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Covers

By on November 9, 2012

Over­lap­ping with the brand new client, I’ll con­tinue to jug­gle work for other projects. I’m clos­ing in on a word mark for the duet col­lage rock band, Stratos­phere, and begin­ning to think about pro­mo­tional mate­ri­als. Though many might snidely argue that print is dead, show posters have a long his­tory of iden­tity for musi­cians, as well as cover art for albums. Step­ping into the deep ocean of album cover design might derail this project even fur­ther, so with­out fully digest­ing it’s robust his­tory here all I can really do is present a hand­ful of asser­tions and exam­ples of cov­ers that made a heavy impres­sion on me in my life. And to be objec­tive, we would have month’s of work dig­ging through the annals of music his­tory, doing every­thing we can to avoid get­ting dis­tracted by lis­ten­ing to the music itself. We’d also have to avoid our sub­jec­tive responses to that music (or artists) col­or­ing our impres­sion of the art that was cho­sen to rep­re­sent them.

I won’t attempt to con­vince any­one that these are the great­est album cov­ers of all time, but I’ll present a folio of some of my favorites and those that have an impact on me visu­ally, and quite often lead to an enhance­ment with the music found within their sleeves. What’s truly impor­tant here is under­stand­ing that the iden­tity of the music is often extended into the visu­als we’re first met with; the irony is that at a point in his­tory, the first taste of new music we were often met with was actu­ally a visual. It worked beau­ti­fully in the other direc­tion as well: you’d hear a new tune on the radio, or expe­ri­ence a sym­phony, or you’d be given music shared through a device of some kind—and then you’d see that music rep­re­sented for the first time, through some­one else’s eyes, in the form of cover art. Regard­less, the visu­als and the music they rep­re­sent are just as insep­a­ra­ble as a book cover and the story it envelopes.

Though I’ve been devel­op­ing a word mark for this band, I’ve real­ized that there are many musi­cians who appear to be uncom­fort­able with such a locked and loaded way of rep­re­sent­ing them­selves. As artists, they’re hardly going to be res­olute in any one style, trend, or iden­tity, so why should they have a logo that is the very state­ment of con­fi­dence and per­ma­nence? The Talk­ing Heads, a New Wave band from the 80’s, pub­lished eight full albums over their career, but never once rep­re­sented their titles the same way twice. On the other hand, take the elec­tronic music dj-ninja duet in the 90’s, Daft Punk, who used a sin­gle word mark con­sis­tently over their pub­lished albums with only minor alter­ations the design. Daft Punk wasn’t any less inno­v­a­tive from one album to the next because their logo didn’t change—nor were the Talk­ing Heads los­ing a sense of iden­tity by not find­ing a con­sis­tent base­line of design in their pro­mo­tions. Quite the con­trary actu­ally, as both have been uni­ver­sally touted for a con­stant stream of cre­ativ­ity and evo­lu­tion in their work.

Then there are the artists who take their iden­tity to a whole new level of brand­ing. Many of the most famous enter­tain­ers of all time sub­scribe to out­landish non-pedestrian fash­ions to dis­tin­guish them­selves or their acts. Michael Jack­son, Elton John, Kiss, Madonna, Prince, Lady Gaga, even the Insane Clown Posse have cos­tumes, col­ors, and per­sonas that help extend their music into an entire expe­ri­ence rather than sim­ply a song on the radio. The exam­ple I want to applaud most though is the lo-fi garage band The White Stripes. The mem­bers of this duo rock band, Meg and Jack White, took their pre­vi­ous mar­riage and names and built a brand around not only their music, but their visual iden­tity. Through­out the ten plus years mak­ing music they dressed exclu­sively in red, black and white, giv­ing their image a stark, sweet and mildly macabre tone. They con­tin­ued this palette into their music videos and album cover art­work as well, pro­vid­ing a fla­vor for their fans that was both mem­o­rable and renewed with every expe­ri­ence they had when encoun­ter­ing them.


As mas­ters of their brand, The White Stripes nailed it. I hope to bring some sem­blance of that equity to Stratos­phere, hope­fully in their own dif­fer­ent expres­sion. Though I doubt that it will result in match­ing out­fits or a fun­da­men­tal color palette, I’m look­ing for a con­sis­tency that makes sense and brings out their indi­vid­ual per­son­al­ity. More on that next week.

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Client 19: Fuse

By on November 5, 2012

I dig a good cock­tail. It’s a great tran­si­tion from work to play, it’s an expres­sion of new and clas­sic tastes, and it adds cel­e­bra­tion and class to the oth­er­wise mun­dane act of putting tox­ins in our bod­ies. Alco­hol is an incred­i­bly huge indus­try in the United States, and although we might not think of it that way, it does quite a bit for our econ­omy and sta­bil­ity. The best part about it is that it comes in so many dif­fer­ent forms, and that means that it is sure to con­tinue flour­ish­ing as an enter­prise. There are, of course, a ter­ri­ble amount of draw­backs about it, but we’re usu­ally too tipsy to worry about those. I should say here, before going any fur­ther, that if you do par­take in drink­ing, please do so responsibly.

In the world of spir­its, the con­ti­nent of liquor (my home­town, as it were) is really a very basic thing: grain alco­hol dis­tilled from a fer­mented base prod­uct that’s thrown into some spe­cial ves­sel, often with some other ingre­di­ents for taste. Bour­bon basi­cally comes down to boil­ing corn, adding yeast, remov­ing the waste and then putting it in wooden bar­rels so it tastes good. Once you have the grain alco­hol, the process of mak­ing it taste good is really the chal­lenge, and the fun of enjoy­ing spir­its. If you’ve ever tasted untreated moon­shine, you’d know why that process is so important.


This month I will be turn­ing to a pas­time of my own and attempt­ing to envi­sion it as some­thing much larger than it is. That past­time is infus­ing vodka. Now, vodka is a bit of an excep­tion to the rule in terms of spir­its, in that it is most often prized for being as clear as pos­si­ble, achiev­ing this through sev­eral fil­tra­tion and dis­til­la­tion processes. Vodka con­nois­seurs would be aghast if I were to say that they actu­ally attempt to remove the fla­vor from their spirit, but for the most part it is as neu­tral an alco­holic bev­er­age as you’ll find. With that under­stand­ing, it has a very wide scope of pos­si­bil­i­ties for impart­ing fla­vor, though I should cer­tainly state that fine vod­kas taken neat are a true delight on their own.

I began infus­ing vod­kas sev­eral years ago, in long batches, with dif­fer­ent ingre­di­ents, and often with unpleas­ant results. I rec­og­nized that com­mer­cial vodka pro­duc­ers had made a push for “fla­vored” vod­kas around that time, and after tast­ing some of them I felt a lit­tle let down. They tasted unnat­ural and forced to me, and the real soul to a fla­vored vodka might bet­ter come across if it tasted more real. The way the com­mer­cial pro­duc­ers went about this push was clearly for sales, lean­ing on the ver­sa­til­ity of their spirit to have a cus­tomer choose not one bot­tle of the stan­dard clear stuff, but to “class it up” with … apple fla­vor­ing. I was skeptical.


About two years have gone by and I’ve tried every­thing from nut­meg and rhubarb all the way to my own (hope­fully more nat­ural) apple fla­vor­ings. I’ve got­ten a han­dle an amounts, length of time to rest the infu­sion, and what to do with it after it’s done. This month, I’m going to envi­sion this pas­time as real busi­ness, and though I use stan­dard clear vod­kas as my base, this busi­ness would clearly be dis­till­ing their own prod­uct, and infus­ing them with their own mate­ri­als. I’m call­ing this com­pany Fuse for its sim­plic­ity, it’s rel­e­vance and hope­fully its pleas­ing tone. One of the things I’ve loved most about my con­coc­tions is how nat­ural and fresh they taste to me. I attempt to seek out rich and real foods and fla­vors, unique and under­es­ti­mated com­bi­na­tions, and then spring them into some­thing truly char­ac­ter­is­tic in their final forms as cock­tails. A com­mon final prod­uct, how­ever, is when the infu­sion is com­plete, it often needs very lit­tle more than ice and a fancy glass to make it a delight­ful beverage.


Though my pas­time is more of the client than any real, or fic­tional per­son, I’ll still be in the world of make-believe, where Fuse is a com­pany that has hired me to brand their prod­uct. They’ll even­tu­ally expect pack­ag­ing ideas, a logo or mark of some kind, and prob­a­bly pro­mo­tional mate­ri­als by the end. They’ve got a lot to say about what makes Fuse a deli­cious expe­ri­ence, and although their descrip­tions are a tad bit slurred, they’ve summed up their iden­tity with these five words:

• Nat­ural
• Unex­pected
• Crisp
• Clar­ion
• Recognizable

It almost sounds as if they’re sell­ing water, which is funny because that’s in the ety­mol­ogy for the word vodka in the first place. It’s cer­tainly not water though with an iden­tity that is unex­pected, but putting antonyms in a brand list is going to make for some­thing inter­est­ing hope­fully. So, off I go to pour ideas into my head for a month and see if the liquor of design comes out sweeter on the other side.

Photo of apple fall cock­tail by Martha Williams

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Patience

By on October 19, 2012

Finally, one last crit­i­cal com­po­nent to col­lage is patience. This is a means of fab­ri­ca­tion, of art mak­ing, of craft that sim­ply comes to you, and is less about you ven­tur­ing to find it. Col­lage is like a trap; you can have the best machin­ery, the per­fect bait, and opti­mal con­di­tions, but since it is a form of mak­ing visu­als from other pre-made visu­als, and those visu­als are col­lected over time, there is an ele­ment of patience required to catch a great assem­blage of art. But this isn’t any­thing new or dif­fer­ent from many other forms of art; cast­ing, for instance, takes an incred­i­ble amount of patience and time, just from a tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive. In the case of col­lage, the time comes from allow­ing visu­als to come to you, keep­ing a close eye on the world around you, ready to col­lect some­thing should it attract your art’s sensibilities.


There are lots of kinds of traps how­ever, and to take the metaphor a bit fur­ther, in this case, it’s about what kind of col­lage you’re mak­ing, and for what pur­pose that defines the col­lec­tion of visu­als. As I explored before, if a col­lage is about cap­tur­ing an envi­ron­ment, then the col­lec­tion of visu­als from that envi­ron­ment is pretty straight­for­ward; my staid office lead to sim­ply pick­ing up and cut­ting up things around my desk and floor and sur­round­ings and assem­bling them into a com­po­si­tion. If your goal for a col­lage is more aimed at cap­tur­ing an iden­tity, and that iden­tity relates to many more aspects of life than sim­ply its envi­ron­ment, then mul­ti­ple traps should be set. And it could take a long time.


Enough with hyper­bole now, it’s not to say that all col­lage requires you to just wait around and put things you find in a box until it’s time to sit at a table and cut them all up into pieces. You can eas­ily go hunt­ing for imagery to cap­ture your expres­sion as well, my ulti­mate point here is that over time, col­lect­ing visu­als that inspire you and keep­ing them in a box some­where allows for a more gen­uine and pure expres­sion of your­self when you come to the assem­bly of them; as opposed to decid­ing when to col­lage, and then seek­ing out imagery at that moment, to cap­ture your intent or char­ac­ter. If you’re rep­re­sent­ing some­thing for­eign, how­ever, you have to retrain your col­lec­tion cri­te­ria, the things you see and acquire that remind you of the new con­cept. This means you have to go hunt­ing, and less gathering.


With all this rhetoric what I’m attempt­ing to under­stand is the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between a musi­cian who mixes their music, and a musi­cian who writes their music. There are obvi­ously many shades of grey between the two tech­niques, but with the extreme case of Stratos­phere who almost solely gath­ers, remixes, and reorders audio into musi­cal pieces, it is that qual­ity that dis­tin­guishes them as a band, and that’s the oppor­tu­nity for dis­tin­guish­ing them in their identity.


Look­ing at the brand one x closer, they too are col­lect­ing only cer­tain sounds that express them—within the con­text of their mix-matching tech­nique there is even fur­ther a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of their music, specif­i­cally. For that I’ll turn to their 10 words they pro­vided me that they say embody them. Though I’m pretty sure they made these words up in about 2 min­utes to force me into a cre­ative tail­spin, if a seed is absolutely some­thing I need to begin a project, then these seem­ingly ran­dom and dis­as­so­ci­ated words will do. So I jump into the design phase after my exploratory bird walk for this project, and finally get to sketching.


The goal at this point for Stratos­phere is to indeed develop a form of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion mark, pos­si­bly detached from any words at all, and then to apply that mark in a fash­ion to their pro­mo­tional mate­ri­als. Scat­tered in this post are some of the ideas per­co­lat­ing for the band, through words, sketches, and more imagery that, for what­ever rea­son, seem to gather at the soul of the music and their identity.





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