Design

/ Don

ERA404 Rebranding

You may’ve noticed a new logo up there in the right corner of [d]online. To celebrate 10 years since I created my studio, era404 Creative Group, and because my stationery was finally running out, we felt it was time to update our brand.

Over the last decade, era404 has truly transformed from a design and development shop to one that provides comprehensive, strategic campaigns. Our best projects—the most rewarding and enjoyable ones—have spawned from relationships with clients that have fully embraced our nature as an ideas company. This is to say that when clients approach us with ideas, they hire us for more than just implementation. Rather, we’ve been privileged to be involved from Day One concepting through the complete process of strategy, design, development and continued maintenance of their campaigns. With these projects, we’ve had the pleasure of not only participating in the growth of their ideas and bringing them to life, but helping shape them with our knowledge and experience in the industry. Read more

/ Don

Creative Shopping Bags

I’m a sucker for creative packaging design. I think that’s the reason my mom sends these forwards to me. There is so much creativity when it comes to these that I’m simultaneously envious that I didn’t think of them and reverential for the designers who did. But maybe that’s how we’re supposed to feel. If, one day, my company is hired by a client to do packaging design, I’m excited to see what sort of creative ideas we can design together.

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/ Don

Typeface T-Shirts

These shirts that were designed to have the silhouette of 5 famous typefaces; Helvetica, Caslon, Baskerville, Courier, and Cooper Black.

In the world of typography, terms such as typeface, character, body, etc are used to describe the form of a letter. The reason why they use expressions closely related to a human body, is perhaps because each different letter has a distinct quality and personality, in a similar way that us humans are all unique.

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/ Don

Book Trailer: ROOM, by Emma Donoghue

My company, ERA404 Creative Group,  just finished editing this book trailer for the new novel by Emma Donoghue, “ROOM.” The book has already been shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize and has received a ton of wonderful publicity. This video was shot in the client’s audio lab at Little, Brown and Company. The actor is the son of publisher Michael Pietsch and is actually a very good artist. Coaching a little kid to draw poorly is more difficult than it sounds, but he did a wonderful job anyway.

While I selected the script, edited the audio and directed the shoot, the editing and cinematography was done by Mike Citarella and the video was shot under the guidance and creative assistance of LBC Marketing Maven (and Craft Services for the shoot), Amanda Tobier. The official site for ROOM (www.roomthebook.com) is expected to launch next week.

This is the third video we’ve concepted for a book. The first was the viral video (NSFW) for Charles Bock’s “Beautiful Children,” which rocketed through the web with the help of Adrants and Gawker articles. The second was for Joshua Ferris’s “The Unnamed” web site, which showcases surveillance video from Grand Central Terminal.