When tours are given around Journey Group’s office, each employee puts on his or her most composed face. “Working here must be amazing,” visitors often remark.
It’s true, working at this beautiful place with fantastic people is a real treat. Equally true, however, is just how grueling our work can be. In the “Ski Lodge,” the creative team sweats under the heat of tight design and development deadlines.
Come with me for a quick look over a few shoulders. Try to avoid the perspiration.
01
Matt is working on another installment of EFCA Today. Often conceptually themed, EFCA Today demands original design and illustration for each issue. Some concepts are challenging to capture graphically, as was the last issue: “Pondering Spiritual Transformation.” However, it’s often the case that the most obvious solutions are the best. This was particularly true for the current issue shown here, titled “Reducing Exposure.” Familiar to all, the color and iconographic palette of safety signage was a risk-averse direction. Proceed with caution, Matt.
02
Often under graphic-designer-noise-canceling-headphones, Josh heads deep into the woods of coding. Habitat for Humanity has published Habitat World magazine in print form for 26 years. Now blazing a new publishing path, Journey will translate the look of the custom art-directed magazine to the web. Using responsive web-design techniques, each page Josh creates will handsomely respond to the user’s devise — be it mobile, tablet or desktop. Feel free to go back into the forest, Josh.
03
It’s early fall here in Charlottesville, but Ashley is already dreaming of springtime in Washington, D.C. The Cherry Blossom Festival, beginning March 20 in our nation’s capital, is being commemorated with a 2012 USPS stamp. Every year the design team concepts and designs stamp-collecting products to complement upcoming stamp releases, and this time Ashley is designing a suite of letterpress cherry blossom notecards. Choosing the production method plays a large role in design aesthetic. Come winter, Ashley will keep warm watching this design come hot off the letterpress.
04
Journey Group is another great client of ours. Lest we turn into the cobbler’s kids, we’ve begun treating our own internal projects with the same integrity as an outside client’s project. Zack, Journey’s media strategist, is currently in the wireframing stage of our new company website. It looks like he’s writing about his own role here. It’s all Greek to us, Zack.
05
This shot was really hard to take. This is me, Mike, designing a large-format brochure for the NFL Alumni Association — one of our newest clients. It’s exhilarating for the design team to start work with someone new. It’s akin to my 5-year-old getting a new set of toys in our playroom. New fonts, new colors, new (vintage NFL) images!
The tour concludes here — I have to get this brochure over to Lindsay to prepare for press today. But you’re welcome to come back again soon. We’ll have our game face on.