The AVM was approached by legendary wine man Charles Banks about repositioning a vineyard out of South Africa, Tulbaugh Mountain Vineyards. We worked with Charles team on naming, brand positioning, logo, bottle label design, web design and identity design.

Fable, as the name suggests, is a wine label meant to inspire conversation - each bottle is named after a South African fable which is shared on the back of each label.

The clients wanted the brand to capture the spirit of a travel journal - as well as embrace the color palette of the locale. We chose to create a layered, painterly, pen and ink journal look reminiscent of Peter Beard's journals. Everything about the brand is adventurous - the way the label is slanted to the way the site navigates...left to right.

The project was a great collaboration and we can't wait to drink from the first finished bottle!

Package Designs

Web Designs

SocialStay is a mobile start-up, Co-Founded by Seth Epstein (The AVM's Catalyst) - Focused on the hospitality industry, SocialStay provides a turn-key enterprise mobile solution to hotels, events and trade shows. Leveraging our deep expertise in branding, design, film and web development,  SocialStay is the opportunity for us to "walk our talk".

SocialStay is currently in beta (as of May 2011) and an invite only platform.

We will share much more work once its publicly available.

The Approach

Shubin and Donaldson is a world class architectural firm with offices in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. They wanted to revamp their Flash based site into a modern ipad friendly wordpress site that was search engine friendly. Additionally, they wanted the site to have navigation that was very easy to understand and that put their work front and center. We focused on image scale to highlight the work and pull viewers into the experience.

The Designs

The world famous Smashbox Studios was looking to move from a flash based site to a site that could be viewed on any device. In addition to being highly visual, the site needed to take into account a shared architecture with its sister company, Quixote Studios. We embraced the emerging Tumblr photo blogging trend to create a site that is extremely visual, playful and exploratory.

The Designs

Network Hardware Resale is the worlds largest reseller of new and used Cisco equipment. With offices in Santa Barbara, New York, London, Amsterdam and Singapore, NHR speaks with clients around the globe daily, yet few customers knew of their reach, scale and capabilities.

We were brought in to help reposition the brand in the mind of consumers. We did a series of branding workshops to more clearly articulate a brand positioning consistent with where they plan to be in 3 years. Out of the branding work, we did a site "refresh" (seen below) in addition to a complete site audit and entirely new site architecture. In addition, we worked closely with a technical partner to rebuild the site from the ground up.

And because of our expertise in film and branding, we also took on creating a series of films which we shot around the globe. The films capture the culture and vision of the company - and are being used by the sales teams, at trade shows and on their website.

The outcome from all of the work?  Clients who had worked with NHR for years, saw them through new eyes and increased spending. Clients that had never considered NHR as a viable alternative to their existing channels, are doing business with NHR.

The Designs

The brand positioning needed to resonate with children and parents alike. We chose an owl to represent wisdom, learning and trust. The color palette is playful but not cliche. We developed a set of icons and symbols that were applied through out the branding efforts. Stickers were made so that they could be applied to folders, papers, brochures, envelopes and most importantly used by the students themselves.

The Designs

CitySearch wanted ideas and fast. The brand had not been updated in a long time and had fallen behind the times. The goal was to position CitySearch as relevant, hip and essential to every day life. In partnership with The Groop, we quickly iterated  web design directions and identity explorations that to help CitySearch be the first place to turn when needing local suggestions.

The Designs