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When specialty food retailer Stahmann's set their sights on the gourmet market, they enlisted branding and packaging graphic design firm Mark Oliver Inc. to pave the way.
"The road from New Mexico family ranch to Nieman Marcus is not an easy one to walk. No matter how rich the tradition or how sweet the pecan brittle, no company moves their product into select stores without the 'look,'" explained Mark Oliver, CEO of Mark Oliver Inc.
Begun over seventy years ago, Stahmann's (the largest privately-owned pecan producer in the world) had established a successful catalog business and country store, but wanted to expand into fashionable gourmet retailers nationwide. The problem, however, was stale packaging that failed to reflect the quality of the product. Awash with muted beiges and featuring Texas-style western fonts, the look was pioneer - but decidedly not gourmet.
"When we asked Mark Oliver Inc. to reposition and brand our product line, we had two focus points: our heritage, and appealing to a high-end customer base. Incorporating both was the challenge," reflects Stahmann's General Manager, Beverly Hart.
With this in mind, staff members traveled to New Mexico gaining access to the family, ranch, employees, and landscape. Privy to tales covering seven decades and to photographs of annual ranch events like a mock b
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Packaging Graphic Design Firm Mark Oliver Takes Stahmann's to New Levels
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Make sure your presentation card speaks to potential clients and colleagues. With materials ranging from pewter to plastic, creative cards are less likely to land in the trash.
Receive an uninspired business card lately? Did it end up in your garbage can or in the darkest recesses of your desk drawer?
Like a limp handshake, a boring or tasteless business card may not send the message you want to potential clients and colleagues.
More than a piece of paper, a business card is a reflection of your business and of you. Sometimes it is the key to getting a job or landing a key client.
Sonia Jacobson, an image consultant, says she relies on first impressions to decide whom to do business with. And she extends that rule of thumb to business cards.
''When a card is good quality paper, creative, unusual and catches my attention, I am more inclined to think positively about that person,'' says Jacobson, who is also executive director of Suited for Success, a nonprofit that helps low-income women and men re-entering the workforce.
''If the card is extremely memorable then I will keep it and put it in my special Rolodex where I can find it easily and refer to it when I might need it,'' she says.
People should think of their business cards as part of their companies' branding, but not all industry groups do, says Tom W
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www.ken... (783)
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Michael Patrick Partners (MPP) of Palo Alto, CA has received seven new design awards in three prestigious competitions.
The winning entries will be included in publications for American Corporate Identity 21, Graphis Design Annual 2006 and HOW 2005 International Design Annual.
In the trademark category, MPP received awards for work done for BlueRun Ventures of Menlo Park, CA, a venture capital firm; Ingenio of San Francisco, CA, a performance-based online advertising system; Convera of Carlsbad, CA, a provider of enterprise search and categorization solutions; LoanCity of San Jose, CA, a wholesale residential mortgage lender; SquareHit Tennis of Belmont, CA, a manufacturer of sports training aids; and 500 BC of Great Falls, VA, a jewelry designer.
In the annual report category, an award was presented for Pacific Sunwear of California of Anaheim, CA, a specialty retailer of casual apparel for active teens and young adults. Each design assignment was created under the direction of Senior Designer Eko Tjoek.
New or refreshed identity system design has become one of MPP's specialties.
Over the years the firm has completed more than 300 assignments including start-up programs, mergers and acquisitions, and refreshing existing brands.
Their most notable design is the internationally recognized E*TRADE logo.
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Michael Patrick Partners Picks up Seven New Design Awards
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Colorguides, an internet distributor for Pantone color products, announces the new and improved Pantone color guides are now available on their web site.
The most revolutionary new product is the color bridge. The Pantone color bridge is a must have guide for web and graphic designers.
This guide contains CMYK percentages for reproducing the solid color in 4 color process, as well as HTML values, enabling web designers to use the Pantone palette in web design.
The standard for web design has been the Netscape browser safe palette, which only contains 216 colors.
The most recent statistics show that 94% of internet surfers have browsers which are capable of displaying a minimum of 65,000 colors.
So why are designers using only 216 colors?
Until now, incorporating Pantone solid colors has been difficult. With the Pantone color bridge, HTML values are printed underneath the solid color chip, allowing web designers to expand their color palette to 1000 colors.
The web safe color palette is now officially dead.
If you would prefer using software, the Pantone Colorist includes the same solid color palette, and works with any software program accessing the Windows or Mac color pickers, such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Front Page, Apple Keynote, or Macromedia Web Tools. How much easier can it get to incorporat
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New Color Tools Available for Graphic and Fashion Designers
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The Graphic Design team at Baxa Corporation was awarded two 2005 American Inhouse Design Awards from Graphic Design USA - a national magazine for design professionals - for their humorous and creative work on a three-part direct mail campaign for the company's Rapid-Fill Automated Syringe Filler (ASF).
The team also won an award for Baxa Corporation's 30th Anniversary product catalog, which featured extensive reference materials and special direct mail offers. The annual awards recognize the outstanding work of in-house designers.
The direct mail campaign, entitled "Missing Essentials," featured three separate postcards, each with something missing - a coffee machine with no coffee pot; an empty toilet paper roll and a pharmacy laminar airflow hood without the Rapid-Fill ASF.
The final mailer included magnets of the previous missing essentials, so that they could be added back to "complete" the pharmacy, the message indicating that no pharmacy can be without these critical items.
The direct mail pieces were mailed to more than 9,000 pharmacists in hospitals across the United States.
"The team has such creative energy and intuitive understanding of what Baxa is and what we stand for as a company", notes Greg Baldwin, Company Chairman and CEO.
"I did not need an award to know this, but it's a good time to recogn
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Baxa Corporation Honored with Two American Inhouse Design Awards
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