Project brief: The Bold Italic presented us with an article about the waning popularity (and hopeful resurgence) of San Francisco’s famous Hippie Hill. In response, we not only created artwork that reflected the article’s content but also wrote and designed our own “From Hipster to Hippie” meta-narrative to accompany the text (later turned into a separate poster offered for sale by the Bold Italic)—all in less then five days.

Approach: Creative director Eric Heiman and lead designer Talin Wadsworth collaborated on the initial ideas and vision for the design. Once a direction was decided on, Talin Wadsworth did the necessary design and programming to make the work web-ready for publication.

Effectiveness: The article received a high amount of hits for the Bold Italic site. Judging by the Bold Italic’s commissioning a poster based on our “From Hipster to Hippie” meta-narrative, numerous posts about and links to it on a variety of blogs and its inclusion in a soon-to-be-published book, Yesterday on the Internet, the design seems to have struck a nerve.

Humor in design and story. Hyper-local designer for hyper-local platform. On target for community. Design communication at its best.