Found this at the local library while playing with Clementine. Playmobile’s version of a clover. Sort of fun, hunh? See, you get a 4 leaf, a 3 leaf, and the flower in there…
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Brooke got some shoes for Christmas that came in this awesome box. I think it’s just great.
Brooke (my wife) knits. She bought these stitch counters the other day, some Japanese company called Clover.
I saw this sticker in Central. Great hunh? I’ve really got to figure out our logo. It’s not going to look anything like this, but I hope it has some of the originality that draws me to this sticker.
It’s no secret that my counter tops take their inspiration from Northampton Coffee. I love that place, and in part the level of care and energy that went into creating an environment that reflects the spirit of the place. Example: no art on the walls because the coffee is meant to be the art.
Researching their counters brought me to the furthest corner of Massachusetts on a cold wet day. I wanted large, thick, rough-edged, local wood. I found two beautiful slabs of red oak, both from New England. I fell in love, wrote a check for a very reasonable sum (I think it was $140 for one, and $160 for the other), strapped them to my car, and I was off. (more pictures after the break)
I’m working with Joshua Hester on developing a “brand platform.” This means getting the philosophy, boundaries, and visual elements that define the brand right. Josh is a visual designer and going to help translate my abstract vision for the Clover brand into a concrete visual identity.
To start with, we are working on the logo for the food truck. This will work on the website, on the truck, and on the packaging. We’ve got some great people looking over our shoulders through the process (Erik Joule of Quiksilver, Brian Collins of Collins Design Research, and Rick Ridgeway of Patagonia). Clover images after the break.
This is the second part of the homework assignment Brian gave me. Here are a bunch of magazine ads. I’ve grouped them in two categories:
- “More of” – the ads that have something to contribute to the process of developing the Clover identity
- “Less of” – ads with elements we must avoid
Here are a bunch of pictures of clovers I’ve collected over the past several months.
Moving away from graphic references to designing the space, here are some thought I’ve had about the feelings I’m looking to evoke. I’m really excited about the truck design, because I think a ton of this will come through thanks to John and Jinhee and everyone else helping make it happen. You should expect to see more of these themes pop up in the restaurants (perhaps in a different version).
This is the area I’m weakest on right now. Thankfully I have some great typographers helping me through this process. Check out Hester’s all-type video on youtube:
My ideas for texture flow from the aspirations for the brand. Like nature, textures found in Clover should reveal a history. Note the process marks on the potato print. You can see where the ink lay down in the printing process.
Note the patterns of the Clover flower and leaves. They are ordered, but not perfectly ordered. In my previous life we’d call a material exhibiting these characteristics a “quasi-crystal.”
I don’t know which if any of these we’ll end up using, but these are my first take at defining Clover’s colors. I spent too much time looking through aisles of stores, looking through magazines, etc. before I realized that the proper place for Clover’s inspiration to come from is nature. And there are some fantastic references that come from agrarian America (e.g., 1800s seed catalogs).
(painting is by Vilhelm Hammershoi, a danish painter from the early 1900s)
So this is where the visual identity for Clover begins: a puddle of sunlight.
A place you want to move towards/ sit under. When people think of it they want to take a deep breath through their nose, the creases around their eyes relax a little, they drift away for an instant: surrounded by a warmth of satisfaction, more things are possible, life feels more real.
Clean, clear warmth
Not orange/ red warmth
Nature-aware
Not “crunchy”
Forward looking, contemporary
Not post-modern (slick, self-referential, jaded)
Comfortable, welcoming
Funny, but conscientious and smart
Not condescending, never self-involved
Discover new things
Not lecture
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