Studiofluid’s branding and design work for Tango Mango is featured in the book, FIRE IT UP: Building Restaurant Brands that Blaze.

If you are a restaurant owner or promoter, this book is for you. It spells out the 10 indelible rules of restaurant branding, gives marketing advice, presents ideas for a social media strategy, and includes branding checklists and case studies of restaurants that are doing it right.

Our work for Tango Mango is featured as a case study for how to create a restaurant brand that catches fire. Here’s a clue: Your brand is not your logo. Want to know more? Here’s the link to order your copy.

The book is authored by Joseph Szala, the creative director of Vigor Branding, an agency in Atlanta, Georgia.

Some of the branding agencies with featured projects include:

Avroko, New York City, NY
Bernstein-Rein, Kansas City, MO
Brains on Fire, Greenville, SC
Helms Workshop, Austin, TX
Knoed, Chicago, IL
Mucca Design, New York City, NY
Pentagram, New York, NY
Seamless Creative, Astoria, NY
Stir, Kansas City, MO
Studiofluid, Los Angeles, CA
Tad Carpenter, Kansas City, MO
Push, Orlando, FL
Vigor, Atlanta, GA

Big thanks to everyone that contributed to the project and to Joseph Szala for publishing together such an informative and timely book. Now let’s get to work making the world a tastier place!

How much could a website redesign could help your brand? Increase conversions? Improve customer loyalty?

Well, here’s a chance to go behind the scenes and see how other companies have improved their websites through design. Photos.com is presenting a showcase of “Before and After” design solutions for websites as a resource for small businesses to learn from. Studiofluid was selected as one of a handful of design firms included in the gallery, representing Los Angeles and Southern California with the branding and eCommerce project we completed for AutoAnything. (link to our project).

You can get a sense of the strategy involved and see some of the impressive results from design around the crountry. They’re also offering a contest with the prize being a FREE makeover of your own site, so be sure to check it out. Good luck!

This month we’re working on an educational site for the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) called “Shout.” The Shout program is a joint venture between Smithsonian Institution, Microsoft Partners in Learning and TakingITGlobal.

Shout mobilizes teachers and students from around the globe to participate in collecting scientific data in an effort to understand climate change. The program begins in November and covers a range of topics that relate to environmental responsibility and understanding.

Working across multiple time zones with such notable organizations has made for a fun and exciting collaboration. It’s been fast-paced and far-reaching, with project stakeholders located in Washington D.C., Seattle and Canada, and our strategic partner, LearningTimes, located in New York City.

Studiofluid refined the site wireframe, designed the site visuals—including hand-lettering and custom icon set—then handled the front-end development, with a turnaround time of less than 2 weeks. Whew!

Here’s a link to the live site.

Our current project is still very much under wraps…

We’re developing a cohesive brand language, so our client can differentiate from the competition and utilize their brand as a point of emotional connection with customers. Branding can play an even more critical role in the e-commerce space. After all, unlike a brick-and-mortar store, if a customer isn’t engaged, they competition is only one back-button click away.

Our client is an IR 500 Retailer but that’s about all we can say for now. We’ve completed the competitive analysis, developed customer personas and have compiled all of our findings into a brand strategy document that serves as a roadmap for the identity.

We’ve mostly finished up refining the logo, typefaces and color palettes, and now we’re extending all of the visual language to website graphics and UI, stationery, catalog spreads, print advertisements and more. Our final component will be to deliver a comprehensive brand guidelines document, so that whoever is creating new collateral—whether an internal designers or external vendors—their clients visual branding will maintain consistent branding over the long term.

That’s all we can say for now. Stay tuned!

Yes, it’s official! We’ve received word that the logo we created for the Pasadena Wine Festival will be included in LogoLounge 6: 2,000 International Identities by Leading Designers.

While our primary focus is to create breakthrough branding work that serves our client’s business objectives, it feels good to have our work recognized for excellence by the wider design community. You can check out the rest of brand identity that we created for the Pasadena Wine Festival in the project area.

Congratulations to everyone else who was selected, and thanks to the folks at LogoLounge for the great books you produce. We’re looking forward to getting our hands on a copy.

If you haven’t noticed, gourmet food tucks are somewhat of a craze here in Los Angeles. And the Tango Mango Italian Ice Truck that we designed rolled out this weekend, so we got to go sample flavors and check out the action on Hillhurst Ave in Los Feliz.

The Tango Mango Truck is taking old-school Italian Ice to the Streets of L.A. Our client, Art, is a happy man these days, telling us how customers immediately respond to the branding we’ve developed and are excited to try his product. You can see more of the work we did for him in the project area, including the logo, vehicle wrap and more photos of the truck.

So the truck looks good, but how is the Italian Ice? Insanely good, of course! We only work with clients that we believe in, and these guys have earned our stamp of approval. Creamy, refreshing with chunks of real fruit, give Tango Mango a try when they’re in your corner of Los Angeles—you won’t be disappointed! You can follow every move of TangoMango on twitter.

Today we threw all client work to the side, in favor of sitting in front of a lens and staring at bright flashes of light.

Stu and I needed some new portrait photos for bios and in the about section. We called on Josh Ross to get the job done right. He didn’t disappoint—he made the process easy and we’re thrilled with the results. Thanks, Josh!

Here’s an outtake from the shoot. You know, something to have on file for when FastCompany gives us a call.

The Pasadena Symphony Association partners with The Americana at Brand in Glendale, California, to host their Musical Circus on the lawn, and we provided some of the supporting materials.

The Musical Circus is a perennial favorite for children 3-8 years of age, which reaches some 5000 children and their families yearly from around Southern California. The Circus begins with the instrument “petting zoo” where youngsters can toot flutes, blow trumpets, pluck violins and cellos and bang on percussion instruments. Best of all, the Musical Circus is free for the whole family.

If you’d like one of these fun coloring pages, come out to the event, or you can download a free PDF. Enjoy!

The folks at LogoLounge have selected our work for inclusion in their prestigious Master Library Collection…

We’re both honored and stoked to say the least. The award and recognition is for our logo & brand identity for Half Badger Records.

The email said:

“Your work has been selected for inclusion in a remarkable new LogoLounge project, ‘Animals and Mythology’, in the new Master Library series…”

the messsage continued… “What is the Master Library series? Like our existing (and continuing) LogoLounge book series, the new Master Library books will bring you exemplary logo design work from creatives around the world. Our first book in the series, Initials and Crests, is at the publisher as we write and promises to be a new best selling series from Rockport in the model of LogoLounge.

Unlike our original series, though, each book in the Master Library series will focus on a very specific logo design category, to wit:

Initials and Crests
Animals and Mythology
Typography
People
Shapes and Symbols
Nature and Food
Arts and Culture

We hope to include your work in the the Master Library series, Animals and Mythology.”

The Master Collection will be published by Rockport and should be released in July 2010. Amazon already has it available for pre-order.

When it came time to speak about the brand strategy and our results, I had the floor for a few minutes to articulate our process and share about our new branding results. I’d like to think that I shared a few insightful words, but what made it into the final piece?

I’m credited with saying “really cool.”

Probably did, too.