The coolest Christmas Blog Ever!

We’re proud to announce the birth of our latest venture Batman Smells, a new blog dedicated to Christmas kitsch culture and design. Visit often for cool gift ideas, decorating tips, music and movie reviews, holiday recipes and whatever else strikes our fancy!Don’t forget to subscribe via RSS!

Angel Editions

We’ve once again teamed up with Red Productions to establish an online presence for Angel Editions, publisher of innovative illustrated and custom books.We wanted to create a site with an intuitive navigation and a minimal look that keeps the focus on the beautiful books.

Launch site

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Logo Lounge Vol. 5 – Winning Work

Luke Despatie & The Design Firm will have 7 logos featured in the next volume of the preminent logo showcase series – Logo Lounge. The book will be released in June 2009. Here are the winning pieces:

ADCC Awards – Winning Work

Luke Despatie & The Design Firm have won 2 awards from the prestigious Art Director’s Club of Canada. We’re not sure which flavour we’ve won yet - stay tuned to find out! Continue reading ‘ADCC Awards – Winning Work’

Mexico in your mouth

Jonathan Howells is at it again! Check out his incredible video for the Doritos ad competition:



It’s made the final five, so go vote for it at www.doritos.co.uk 

The Pikes.com

We’re super excited to announce that Luke & The Firm have been selected to re-design the website of Canadian rock icons The Northern Pikes!

Check back for the launch of the new site which is due to go live towards the end of Q1 2008.

Awesome!

Hugo, the Cat of 1000 Faces

Funny vid by Jonathan Howells for Moo 

Plush Safari

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

I made these creepy-cute trophies for Ruby’s room out of some second-hand plush toys and old collectable spoon racks.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Who’s next?!
(Also note the faux Farrow & Ball wallpaper!)

Typographic Justice

It would seem that someone has taken exception to this pub’s lack of punctuation.
I applaud their Vigilance.
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The Evolution of Whisk-bulb

Dana McCauley Logo 

Recently The Design Firm was approached to refresh the Identity of Dana McCauley & Associates, a consultancy providing services such as food product concept architecture, recipe development, food writing, and food trend tracking and analysis.They felt that their existing logo was a bit dated and wanted an identity that was at once creative and intelligent but cheerful and accessible 

Befor and After

Some of the earlier taglines we were working with were “Cutting edge creativity” and “Bubbling over with creativity”.We started by exploring creative symbols and trying to merge them with food icons.

Creativity Sketches

Other random sketches.We were playing around with whisk illustrations and then it happened … Whisk-bulb! 

Whisk Sketches

 

Digital explorations of various other concepts.

Various Digital Explorations 

When the dust had settled, Whisk-bulb won out. Above are some different variations on the bulb concept. We added threads to the bottom of the whisk to reinforce the bulb image and went with the colours of chocolate and butter to better represent food.

Whisk-bulb finals

 In the end, the client changed the tagline to “Whipping up bright ideas”!