Hot Hot HOT Cocoa

Oh how I miss Critch. No, not that critch.

You see, Gale Venosdel (or Critch, aka Lawrence, to me) was an art director here at Marlin. He’s now gone back home to roost in Tulsa and keeping his family fed via Littlefield.

He, Chris Rock, account exec Dan Schultz and I worked on a direct mail promotion for Starbucks hot cocoa. Gale did almost all the work on this one. He got me involved to tighten up the typography and illustrations.

Believe it!

Tin Man

Coffee cake is great. But Sandy’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake (SSCCC) is an out-of-body experience.

In an effort to express the uniqueness of SSCCC Sweet Street wanted to offer the snack in a tin through their cybernet store.

I utilized off-the-shelf SSD assets and invented a few new ones to create a brand dress that felt Sweet Street but uniquely its own.

We shipped off the concepts to the big heads in Reading, PA only to have the whole project evaporate into the misty mountains of the Ozarks.

Oh well.

Marlin Stationary

With the parting of the ways of Marlin and Deep, a new identity for the new millennium was called for…


The Marlin Company has been around for nearly 25 years and have had several logos along the way. With this iteration, through our long history and niché recognition, we were confident enough to hone the brand from ‘The Marlin Company’ to ‘Marlin’. We also shortened the horizontal footprint by creating a ligature between the ‘i’ and ‘n’ and mirroring the dot of the eye to make (every copywriters worst nightmare) a banger. The logo reads as Marlin, though if you were to study it, the ligature might become tiresome. But a great mark ought to be seen, not read.

The stationary was printed on the Curious Collection’s Curious Metallics. We had each item’s reverse flooded with one of four Pantone solids. The business cards had the four colors alternating so that all employees received a deck with four different variations of their calling card.

Oh, and about that banger I mentioned above, stick it Rock! And you too Garson!

Booth Bear Label

Booth Ranches, a citrus grower in Orange Cove, California, was founded by the great-grandson of Times Mirror founder Harrison Gray Otis’s namesake, Otis Booth

Ranked number 181 by The Forbes 400, Mr. Booth leaves the day-to-day operations to his daughter Loren. She stumbled into my studio on a referral by interior designer Napier Hill, where we began working to develop the Booth brand.

The Otis Orchards label uses a variation of the iconic California Grizzly Bear from the state’s flag standing sentinel over the fruit of their labor. The bold graphic was designed to pay homage to the Booth family’s long history with Los Angeles and the Golden State.

Cheat

The Art of Pastry Chefdom.

Our heroes, Sweet Street Desserts, provide the nation’s leading restaurant chains delectable desserts that make a pastry chef question their very existence.

The SSD team here at Marlin is always thinking about ways to position the Reading, Pennsylvania confectioner within the minds of operators and ultimately consumers.

Marlin’s president, Michael Stelzer, and senior copywriter, Judith Garson came up with the idea of a cheat sheet for pastry chefs. The solution was simple yet impactful: Create a bible-like book that operators could use as a ‘cheat‘ to offer diners gourmet desserts without the expense of an on-site pastry chef.

My design application used a bible-like format with a calligraphic ‘Cheat‘ imprinted upon a vellum flysheet and overlaying a beautiful plated dessert with the cover typography and ornamentation crafted to the tone of an old tome.

Amen.

Catalyst

Agencies have war rooms. We have a Cat Room, or CAT.RM.

Cat, short for catalyst, is how we summarize our approach to creative problem solving. A catalyst is something which accelerates a reaction. That’s what we attempt to do at Marlin.

This mark has two drops coming together to form the ears and face of a feline.

Me-Yeeooow!

Marlin Employee Handbook

It's time to throw some new stuff up.

When I started at Marlin I was handed a little black vinyl three ring binder outlining the company’s mission, vision, structure, rules, etc. It was OK, but it didn’t remotely capture the soul of the comapny and the dynamic personalities that make it up.

For the quad-annual company meeting held at the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, we decided to revamp the employee handbook and formalize the relationships between the four companies under the Marlin Network umbrella. It covers all four companies, Marlin, Deep, iMarlin, and Food IQ.

The image above represents the marks of the four agencies that make up the Marlin Network, and the design of the book is the tone that will become the Marlin Network’s website currently under development.