May 2007

On Friday 18 May 2007 at the Museums Australia Publication Design Awards, Meeting a Dream: Albert Tucker in Paris 1948-1952 won best catalogue with Living in landscape: Heide and houses by McGlashen and Everist a highly commended. Also receiving a highly commended was the Winter Garden Party invitation to launch the re-opening of Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Established in 1981, Heide Museum of Modern Art is one of Australia’s leading public art museums. Prior to being converted to a museum, Heide was the home for John and Sunday Reed who were champions of the modernist art movement in Australia.

Renowned for its close association with many iconic Australian artists, particularly those of Australian modernism (Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval) as well as later generations including Charles Blackman, Mirka Mora and the Imitation Realists, Heide Museum of Modern Art is home to one of the most important collections of modern and contemporary Australian art.

The objective of this project was to create an identity for Heide Museum of Modern Art that constantly evolved over time, rather than a corporatized rebranding with a multitude of constrictions.

John Reed’s handwritten Heide script was an existing element of the identity that needed to be retained. A structure was developed for the entity name whereby the choice typography becomes a variable and the script remains as a constant. This allows Heide to speak with a different voice depending on the subject matter and the audience.

The separate exhibition campaigns (which are the renewable life of Heide) build around the exhibition content and develop an image to themselves rather than the corporate entity.

Although budgets are minimal, creative thinking in both design and production allow for Heide to represent itself and its program with design that is innovative and effective.

Originally involved in the implementation of the Federation Square identity, the studio has recently been recommissioned  to set the creative direction of the brand and associated marketing campaigns.

Cafe Di Stasio is an Italian restaurant in St Kilda and a nineteen year old institution in Melbourne. The owner is a complex personality whose obsession is the total integration of his lifestyle into the folklore of the restaurant. This involves art, architecture, wine, food and mayhem.

We were commissioned to manage the image and reputation of the restaurant (and the associated elements) not just to ensure its viability but to actively reinforce its reputation as the best Italian restaurant in Australia.

Our approach to regular weekly press has been to infer the experience through the use of bizarre or surreal imagery rather than words, we use the space to promote examples of avant-guard art, show family snaps or the Di Stasio vineyard and wine.

As the owner’s enterprises expand we design the packaging and produce the collateral to appear as a seamless blend of the whole. Again; style, confidence and quality are assumed through the simple but bold graphics and lack of words.

All communication is to the consumer and dining out is an elective spend, so it has to be constant, responsive and innovative. The campaign, as such, is never ending and timeless.

Success can be measured by patronage, the cafe is always full, even when others are struggling but reputation is anecdotal. However patronage depends on reputation and by managing the reputation the cafe continues to be phenomenally successful. Readers seek out the weekly ads in epicure and the ad spend by competitors is significant income for the Fairfax Group.

In its own small way the Di Stasio imaging is keeping alive Melbourne’s reputation as a style Capital and Victoria as a place for innovative design.