Design | Studio Spotlight: Girlfriend

I love Girlfriend! No - that is not a typo - I'm talking about New York based design studio Girlfriend. Their site sums it up pretty clearly: American Design. New York City. Girlfriend is a design, branding and technology studio creating quality products, services and digitally-driven experiences for its clients and peers. Girlfriend’s process is iterative, responsive, and powered by late nights, pizza and beer. Established in Downtown New York City in 2010.

Edition Hotels  |  From Girlfriend's site:

Edition is an experiment in lifestyle resort boutiques that take the best of their locations and curate them in the image of their surroundings in Barcelona, Waikiki, Istanbul, and many more of the world’s top locations. We (Girlfriend) worked with Monolith NYC to conceptualize a digital lifestyle magazine that would support the brand through editorial and user-contributed content.

Oh web design, you are not (typically) my friend. I'm the first to admit that I am not necessarily a web designer or comfortable/strong with it. If you've been following Design & Dishes for the short time I've been posting, then you will know that I favor print design. Then here comes Girlfriend making me all sorts of jealous of the beautiful art direction and visual design they have given Edition Hotels for their website. The seamless blend of photo and typography is both chic and beautiful and the thin serif font being used is very fashion-forward for web design.

Red Square Agency  |  From Girlfriend's site:

Red Square is one of the south's fastest growing ad agencies. When they asked us (Girlfriend) to rebrand their new online and offline presence, they had one request: “Make it awesome.” That was easy. With a brilliant staff, a powerful voice and the most Mardi Gras-ready office in the world, Red Square is for many things. This time those things were a fresh identity, a modern HTML5 web presence and lots of personality-driven merchandise.

With most studios, what you see is what you get. You don't get to see the conceptual phase or what goes in to the final product so I appreciate Girlfriend for showing branding concepts for some of their projects, like Red Square. I'm particularly drawn to the simplicity of the top left and bottom right logos.

On one hand, Girlfriend's aesthetic and approach to web design is making me think I might need to take a class and/or put a little more effort in to learning the vast realm of experience design. On the other hand, their blog makes me think everything is going to be okay just the way it is.

=)

Design | Studio Spotlight: Dorian

I wasn't able to find much information on this studio seeing as I am not fluent in Catalan or Spanish. Dorian, which is based in Barcelona, caught my eye when it was recently featured on the incredibly superb packaging blog The Dieline. As a frequent reader of said blog, I particularly enjoy their Dieline Wine section which brings me to Dorian's packaging for Finca de la Rica. I think it's ridiculously fun! And attractive.

The write-up was taken from Dorian's site:

"El Buscador" (The Seeker) and "El Guía" (The Guide) are the first two wines from a line whose design is based on the concept of leisure. An image that seeks to promote the recreational and leisure time that comes with a glass of good wine, through a fun and different idea inviting consumers to participate directly on the bottle itself to resolve or complete the puzzles.

Be sure to check out Dorian's other great projects.