BRANDING

PUBLIC BIKES

Design Within Reach founder, Rob Forbes started PUBLIC Bikes to with the goal of introducing fashionable commuter bikes into the retail market. He recruited his friend, well-known type designer Erik Spiekermann, to design an elegant utilitarian sans serif font. 

Tasked to develop the marketing collateral for this bike company startup, I expanded the PUBLIC brand with only the logo as a starting point by creating a modern and friendly visual language in approaching business cards, marketing collateral, sales cards, bike manuals, bike decals, product branding, web design, and store signage.

"Mass Transit for One" became Public Bike's ethos and encouraged a healthier lifestyle for commuters to get to work. Already popular in European cities, bike culture has evolved significantly in America.

UC BERKELEY COLLEGE OF ENVIRONMENTal desIGN

I worked as a consultant for Tenazas Designs led by Lucille Tenazas, former AIGA president and current Associate Dean of AMT at Parsons in NY. When she closed her San Francisco office to take a year sabbatical in Rome, I acquired UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design (CED) as a client. Their office requested designs for note cards, thank you notes, envelopes, and mailing labels to complement the stationary system I had worked on earlier.

For inspiration I took photos Wurster Hall, the architecture department building named after William Wurster, architect and former dean of architecture. Some critics describe the CED building’s aesthetics as Brutalism with its austere exterior of large concrete slabs, but I appreciate the structure with its jutting cement awnings that cast contrasting dark and light shadows in an intricate pattern. While exploring designs, I illustrated two renderings of Wurster Hall. One highlighted the shadows while the other traced the building's repetitive lines. The client chose both designs for print.