2011 – Studio Ace of Spade’s year in review

Dec 28, 2011

by Simon H. in Announcement

Tagged with: 2011, Studio updates, year in review

We’re only a couple days away from New Year’s Eve

2011 is (almost) dead, long live 2012! Well, the year is coming to an end, and it has been an incredible one for Studio Ace of Spade. It has seen, in no particular order:

• Our first full year in business, and the one year anniversary of our collaboration
• A clear increase in the volume of inquiries from potential clients
• Truckloads of amazing projects coming through our doors
• Some great long-term collaborations started with our clients
• The Studio being published twice on Smashing Magazine (“career goal” achieved!)
• The Studio taking over as editors for the GoMediaZine
• The Studio being published as tutorial authors on the GoMediaZine (“career goal” achieved!)
• The Studio being awarded a grant by the Goshen College Business Department
• Our first exhibit at a design festival (Weapons of Mass Creation Fest 2011)
• The opening of our online store 13 Spade
• An almost successful attempt to start a weekly project (Project 52)
• And much more!

2011 project highlights

• 13 Spade
  13 Spade is our very own online store, where you can find some of the posters we design in our spare time but also some other talented artists’ creations.

• Kelly Jae’s Café
  Kelly Jae’s Café is restaurant located on the main drag in downtown Goshen, Indiana that serves unique and delicious foods. With a unique dining experience, Kelly Jae’s can serve as a casual or formal meeting place.

• Menno Tea
  Menno Tea began as a small, on-campus business venture started by Hans Weaver and Niles Graber Miller, both underclassmen at Goshen College. As their distribution area increased, Menno Tea came to us looking for a new design for their bottle as well as a facelift for their website.

• Fletcher Drive
  Fletcher Drive is a web comedy series started by Paddy Connor and Robert Dierx. It’s characters are in and out of touch with reality, and its creators were looking for a brand and web presence which were simple and memorable.

• Writing for Smashing Magazine
  The Studio wrote 2 articles for Smashing Magazine in 2011, and we hope to get at least 3 times as much out in 2012. We wrote about the use of textures in webdesign and about cost-cutting business processes.

• Writing for the GoMediaZine
  We finally got a stab at writing a much requested tutorial about how we use textures in our poster work. The icing on the cake is that we got it published on the GoMediaZine, which has been one of our objectives for a while.

• The Lost & Taken poster
  In the past couple years, there has been a renewed interest in textures in design. It’s gone beyond being a trend, and has been a wonderful tool in the designers and artists toolbox to add visual depth and interest to a project (…). The next step for a designer is to constitute an arsenal of textures, in order to expand the options at his/her hands. (..) After the years, it’s clear to us here at the Studio that in terms of texture resources available online, Lost and Taken has been the most helpful website in this endeavor.

• Kansas Bible Company
  The Kansas Bible Company is a band started by a bunch of our college friends. They asked us to create a poster for their first gig back in the area since they moved to Nashville, TN. We currently have more in the works for them…

• David Culp & Co.
  David Culp & Co. LLP is a full-service firm with collective experiences in all forms of taxation, as well as for profit and not-for-profit accounting, compilation, attestation, and business planning and consulting services. They came to the Studio needing a new website.

What the hell happened to Project 52?

Project 52 was and still is a dear project to us. The concept is quite simple:  for every week of 2011, we would release a quote based poster (see ALAD by Luke Beard for inspiration). We were on the right tracks, and managed to complete 26 installments (the good in math people will notice that’s half of what we planned for).

At first, a failure of one of our trusted computer slowed down our client work so much that we had to catch up on it in priority. The project got put on hold. What happened on top of it is that we got a lot of client work coming in at once. This made us shelve the project for so long it was impossible to catch up before the end of the year. And so, this is how the 2011 Project 52 became Project 26.

The goal for 2012 is to finish that project (we have 2 series of preselected movies and songs already ready!).

Some conclusion notes

2011: awesome year. 2012, hold tight, as we’re planning to go above and beyond!