Plant Street Studios · Case study
A billboard, a water bottle and a recruitment flyer, all answering to the same page of rules.
Plant Street Studios is a new media arts incubator in Orlando. I was the designer on its brand work, and the work split cleanly in two: clients who arrived with nothing, and clients who arrived with a guideline document.
For the first, a corporate identity from the story out. Brand story, colour palette, type system, image guidelines, tone of voice, and the mark drawn last rather than first. For the second, everything downstream of the rules: billboards, flyers, invitations, merchandise, presentation templates, business cards and email signatures, for NBC Sports, AdventHealth, Colibri and Sierra Space.
The work
Fourteen artefacts, four jobs they were doing.
One identity, five surfaces
Sierra Space builds the Dream Chaser, a spaceplane that comes back down onto a runway. The identity is a notched A, a wordmark with SPACE tracked out beneath it, and a teal that runs to black. Five things had to carry it in the same quarter, and no two of them take a gradient the same way.
A billboard read at motorway distance. A conference invitation read at arm’s length. A referral flyer competing with everything else on an intranet. A merchandise range where the mark is embroidered or printed onto fabric that moves. And the photography rules underneath all four.
Three routes, one decision
The Supplier Conference invitation went to Sierra Space on 28 March 2022 as three concept boards. A starfield with the arcs sweeping in from the left and a figure lit from below. The same starfield with the arcs pushed into the top right and the type given the whole left column. Then a teal to gold gradient with no photograph in it at all. The fourth frame is the landscape cut of route one, for the version that would be read on a screen rather than held.
Every page of that presentation is stamped concept art only, not approved for production, which is the honest state of anything a client has not chosen yet. Route one is the one they chose: the invitation in the first tab is this board with the Westin Westminster, the real dates and a real address to RSVP to poured into it.
The part that starts from nothing
The institute teaches Dutch and Flemish and prepares people for the CNaVT exam. This was the whole front of a brand rather than a job downstream of one: the identity, and a low fidelity wireframe for the home page it would live on, presented on 24 January 2022.
The mark folds a speech bubble into a D, and it was drawn to divide: the same counter carries Learn Dutch in orange and Learn Dutch Flemish in navy, two sub brands off one lockup. The palette runs an orange, a green and a red over a cream, a pale blue and a navy, which is what lets the two courses be told apart without redrawing the mark. The institute’s site leads with it today.
Somebody else’s guidelines
Two jobs that never involved drawing a mark. AdventHealth Ocala needed operating room nurses and was running walk in interviews every Wednesday, so the flyer has one job: get a nurse from the headline to a day, a time and an address before they stop reading. The sign on bonus is in the small print because it is a legal sentence, not an offer.
Colibri needed a presentation template, which is the hardest kind of brand defence, because the next person to open it will paste in whatever fits. What it can defend is the masthead, the rule that carries the mark and the shape of the subtitle stack, so those are the parts that are decided.
How it was made
Six things production design teaches that a brand book cannot.
- Role
- Brand identity, art direction and production design
- Timeline
- 2021 to 2022, at Plant Street Studios
- Clients
- NBC Sports, AdventHealth, Colibri, Sierra Space, Dutch Flemish Language Institute
- 01Draw the mark lastan identity is a brand story, a palette, a type system, image guidelines and a tone of voice, and the logo falls out of those. A client who asks for a logo in the first meeting is asking for the end of a process nobody has run yet.
- 02A guideline is a hypothesis until something is printedthe same Sierra Space gradient behaves one way backlit on a screen, another on a 48 sheet at motorway distance, and a third embroidered onto a cap. The rule is only worth what its worst surface leaves of it.
- 03Image guidelines are a licence question before they are a taste questionthe Dream Chaser plate is NASA’s photograph and carries the credit inside the frame. A mood board that describes a look without saying what may legally sit inside it produces work that has to be pulled.
- 04Present three routes, not onethe invitation went over as three boards, every page stamped not approved for production. One route asks for approval. Three ask for a decision, and a client can usually only tell you what they want by ruling two of them out.
- 05Redraw for the format, do not rescalethe portrait invitation and the landscape one place the arcs, the horizon and the three information blocks separately. Scaling a 612 by 864 composition into a 793 by 613 frame drops the figure into the fold and puts the RSVP off the edge.
- 06Recruitment copy is a layout problemthe AdventHealth flyer has to move a nurse from a headline to a day, a time and an address before attention runs out, so the running order is the design decision and the paragraph underneath it is there for the people who are already convinced.
What it cannot claim
Work I would still sign, and four things it does not prove.
None of it has a number attached. Agency production is billed by the job and measured by whether the client signs it off, so there is no impression count behind the billboard, no open rate behind the flyer and no recall study behind any of it. What is here is the artefact and the reasoning that produced it.
Most of it is execution inside somebody else’s system. Sierra Space, AdventHealth and Colibri all arrived with guidelines already written, and the work was to make those rules hold on a surface they had not been tested against, which is a real skill and a different one. The identity built from nothing here is the Dutch Flemish Language Institute, and that is the one to judge the first half of the claim on.
The three invitation boards say concept art only, not approved for production, on every page, because that is what a client presentation is. The version carrying the Westin Westminster and a real address to RSVP to is as far as the folder goes. I know which route was chosen and what was set in it; I did not keep the proof that it was printed.
And not every client is in the gallery. NBC Sports is in the credits because the work happened, and in no tab because the files are not mine to publish, so it is named rather than shown. The competitor research and the wireframing that ran alongside all of this have a study of their own.