Starbucks Sky Cafe Posters

Here at Marlin, Starbucks is the big rooster in our hen house. We had the opportunity to do some retail-side promotion for the Sky Cafe in the landmark Seattle Space Needle. The Sky Cafe is a unique Starbucks retail store that falls in a murky world somewhere between Starbucks retail and the licnesed stores category where we do most of our work.

I was the designer on the project with art director Gale Venosdel (now with Littlefield), copywriter Chris Rock, and account exec Dan Schultz. The idea was to play upon the experience of being in the Space Needle: The view. The assignment had us put together two posters with coordinating counter cards promoting Starbucks summertime drinks: Seattle Chill Mango Melon and Seattle Chill Toffee Nut Lattte.

The illustrations were crafted by Cori Dantini, which captures the hand-crafted world of coffees the Starbuckers roast for each and every one of us. Cori did a fantastic job of commmunicating the spectacular views and the people who see them. Cori is fun to work with and has brought a ton to the table of this project.

Sleep Center Logo Usage

Brashears is a retailer offering medium-tier home furnishings. They are expanding into Springdale, Arkansas home of Tyson Chicken and near neighbor of Wal Mart's headquarters in Bentonville.

Within the new showroom, Brashears is creating a sleep center that is themed around the benefits of sleep. As part of the executional mandatories was the design of a logo to direct bed-buyers to the space. The creative team at Marlin landed on the simple but powerful word of “sleep” to designate the showroom. The idea was to express the benefits of a good night’s sleep through the mark which lead me to use a feather as a metaphor for the feeling a really good mattress offers (and a really good sleep provides).

The big deal on this project, from the standpoint of a designer, was the creation of a logo usage guidelines booklet. Sometimes called a style manual, manual of style, trademark usage or style guide, every brand should have one. But often it’s either overlooked or simply too expensive to produce after the budget was blown on the mark. As a bookend to the Sleep Center logo assignment, I decided to go through the exercise of designing out the guide. The booklet covers the appearance of the logo, color, application, file formats, and a handy guide of usage do's and don'ts.