Word on the Street

Buffo’s Restaurant, a local Highwood treasure, has been serving families on the North Shore of Chicago for over 35 years. We became friendly with the owner, Lenny Innocenzi, not long after he opened Buffo’s.

To introduce its well-established brand into this new channel, Life Fitness approached Street Level Studio to create marketing materials for display in Costco stores.

The humble pixel. A simple, four-sided object (usually a square or rectangle) that is at the heart of our digital world today, and yet it is so often misunderstood.

The term pixel has been around since at least the early 1960’s, and is a combination of the words picture and element. Today, with the widespread usage of digital devices — from digital cameras and scanners to computers, tablets, and smartphones — the term pixel has become part of our everyday vocabulary.

Earlier this year, Inspirion Wealth Advisors asked us to create a new brand that would better represent their company, a progressive, high-end financial advisory firm, and position them as a competitor in their field. Of course, we leapt at the challenge.

Do you ever look at your website and think, “I know something’s not right, but I just can’t put my finger on what it is!”? Your website may benefit from a few different types of changes, but knowing where to start depends on your users.

What if I told you I have hundreds — make that thousands — of people who are interested in your industry and willing to meet you in person? They are eager to learn more and open to making purchases. It’s not too good to be true; it’s just a good old-fashioned trade show.

We were saddened to learn of the recent passing of world-renowned Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger. The world of typography — and the world around you — would be very different without the work of Frutiger, who designed nearly 30 fonts, many of which you use and see every day.

Every color tells a story, and each of the roughly ten million colors that are visible to the human eye conveys a message by producing a chemical reaction in our brains. These messages are often tied to emotional responses, personal memories, and cultural context. They can impact our perception—when you assume that a yellow car on a city street is a taxi—and they can cause us to act—when that same taxi stops at a red light.

So, what happens when we boost this communication by giving the colors names? By adding in language, can we craft these messages and reframe these perceptions?

As the 2015 ISA International Sign Expo approached earlier this spring, our client Canon Solutions America decided they wanted a fun and fresh way to display the wide range of applications their large format printers can produce. They enlisted our help in designing the pieces that would make up “The App Room,” a 20' x 9' display room within their show booth.

With the popularity of digital catalogs, online marketplaces, and image-sharing platforms such as Pinterest, the question arises—are print catalogs still worth it? It seems that for every outdated declaration we hear that print is dead, another catalog appears in our mailboxes. As it turns out, the persistence of print catalogs is supported by recent research.