After several freelance projects and internships I knew I loved working with clients, so in Nov 2023 I reached out to 3 friends hoping to start a design studio.
A year+ later and we’ve had 8 client projects ranging from full brand identities to a zine cover, posters, and logos. Our first year was incredibly packed with lots of questions, important lessons, late night work, and some really exciting opportunities.
These are our 4 most recent projects.
We reached out to Oskar and Katrina from Bob & Barbara’s with a cold email at the perfect time. The shop next door had recently moved and they were opening a new restaurant in the space. All they had was the name, and they need an identity to go along with it.
We presented several options and were happily surprised when Oskar and Katrina embraced the bolder direction. With such a history at B&B’s, we were inspired by classic American comfort food. We wanted the gooey squares to be a combination of classic diner tiles and greasy burgers. We stuck with red to maintain B&B’s brand, but we made it more saturated and poppier so it stands out on South St. and attracts late-night partiers.
When we first took on this project I thought it was a little off target for Dirty Napkin. We were trying to find small businesses and creatives—ASP is a national curriculum sold to religious congregations. But after talking to Rabbi Holzman, it was clear that the passion he was putting into this project made it a perfect candidate.
The project is centered around community discourse and how each person uniquely responds to a series of American texts. We wanted the design system to encourage this discourse. To give each person a voice we designed the documents for ASP with extra white space. This was not only because it looks great, but also for attendees to take notes all over their printouts– everyone’s page would be their own.
Their previous logo had been a vector of Lady Liberty, and while they felt that was too blunt, they wanted to preserve that ethos. So we built the system with elements from Ellis Island immigration documents. The stamps, name entry plaques, and dividing lines are all directly inspired by old documents we found in our research.
A film project had been on our bucket list at Dirty Napkin since day one. So when Evan Harris reached out to us, we were thrilled to work with him for this thriller short.
“Those Eyes” is about a man disassociating and jumping through worlds to escape his past (Think “Everything Everywhere All at Once” but scary). We combined several typefaces to represent these worlds and created a system of collage that allowed any image to fit in the brand. This gave us variety in the imagery to juxtapose many different worlds all while maintaining the right feeling.
We chose to collage things physically to bring someone into our the process. Evan was all about his team and sharing behind the scenes of the short, so we wanted to pay tribute to the “handmade” nature of independent filmmaking with the texture & imperfect angles .
AJ was starting new theater production company in Philly. To kick off his first round of fundraising he reached out for a logo and brand. We were packed with work, but he somehow convinced us to take him on.
This was our first “sprint” and we made the logos over two weeks with meetings squeezed in to lunch breaks, nights, and weekends. We worked closely with AJ to make the logo loud & bright. He wanted to challenge the aging Philly theater scene so we thought the punky, rough type was perfect to shake things up.
These are all collective projects with my co-founders: Nick Evangelinos, Noah Simon, & Dan Soslowsky. They are incredible :)
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