CB2

Challenge

In 2000, Crate & Barrel launched its first CB2 store in Chicago. A sister brand with an urban twist, CB2 was envisioned as a “cool and edgy” modern furniture store for lofts and apartments, featuring fun furniture for playful personalities.

For their grand opening, they partnered with Consolidated Papers and Wausau Papers to host a celebratory, invite-only event targeting the design community of Chicago. They came to us, requesting an event theme, an event invitation, and event signage.

Solution

I themed the evening’s event “Innovation and Integration in Design,” a nod to the nature of the products CB2 carried as well as the audience in attendance. Building on that theme, I developed a phonetic play of “IN” for the evening’s theme, as both a symbol for this select audience of being “in the know” as well as a functional stem for such wordplay as “INNOVATION,” “INSPIRATION,” and “INFORMATION” used in the event materials.

To begin, I shot photography for the invitation to show off the products and capture the urban vernacular of the new store’s location. I also illustrated a stylized architectural rendering of the new building and created icons used on event materials.

For the invitation, I produced an intriguing, multi-page piece to motivate the Chicago design community to attend. An interplay of forms and patterns from page to page led the viewer on a journey, emphasizing the relationship between space and form in the design process. In addition, I wanted to display the versatility and capabilities of the paper company’s paper itself, utilizing various inks and printing techniques on the invitation. We changed inks on each form to present a range of different papers and show their possible uses.

Materials included event invitations, RSVP cards, event tickets, event name tags, event signage, and event banners.

My role: Strategy, Design, Photography, Illustration, Copywriting