CODO Design : Around the Shop!

Over the last year, we’ve taken to writing longer form content to give you all a more intimate look at our process, thinking, and what goes on around the shop. 

After a year and a half of working together, we’re proud to see Eddie and Scott open Big Lug Canteen in Nora. 

Spent a gorgeous day in Benton Harbor, Michigan kicking off a big branding project with North Pier Brewing Co. They’ve got a cool space and a great concept, and we’re excited to help them standout amongst some pretty damn good Michigan breweries. 

We’ve been housemates with Indiana Humanities our entire career and have worked on a good mix of small and not-so-small projects with them. Earlier this year, we were happy to tackle their new responsive website.

It’s a completely custom design, built on Wordpress so their entire team can update it. Other features include a filtered calendar, current program pages, and a constantly updated blog.

Our menu design work for Pizzology and Libertine were just featured on Art of the Menu. This is one of our favorite industry blogs and it’s nice to be featured there again. 

Pizzology Menu on Art of the Menu.

Here’re some new specialty cans from 450 North Brewing Co. Citra Fest has a snake on it, so you know it’s good to go. And Barn Yeti features perhaps the most menacing hillbilly yeti we’ve ever illustrated. Oh, and it’s 9%. Tread lightly, man.

Today marks CODO’s sixth anniversary. Six years. That’s almost one in dog years. In business years, well, just six.

That’s six years of building this company—working with people, organizations, and initiatives we believe in across Indiana, and increasingly, the United States. Six years of working hard, learning as we go, rolling with punches, and always evolving the company, refining processes, and including our clients in the creative process.

Over the last year, CODO members have purchased homes, retired old college cars (with the requisite viking funerals), invested in client companies, gotten engaged, and volunteered time and services around Indianapolis.

We were lucky to travel around the country to beautiful places like Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Virginia. On deck are “working” trips to Alaska, Arizona, New Jersey, Illinois, and if we play our cards right, Mexico. I feel like I say this every other week, but if you were to go back to when we were in school six years ago, back to when CODO was still a dream, and tell me I might get the opportunity to visit a beautiful place, or even fly to another country for work, I would’ve laughed you out of the classroom.

This last year, we won awards, published a magazine, gave big time (and small time) presentations, authored dozens of widely shared thoughts on design (particularly surrounding craft beer), and some of us were even able to take real life vacations. And what started out as a slow trickle has morphed into a scary amount of work within the craft beer industry, with us just inking a deal with our tenth brewery partner.

Rather than continue to list every exciting thing that happened to us this year, I’ll talk for a minute about what’s to come for CODO. Over the next year, we’ll be hiring some new folks. We’ll be publishing a Craft Beer Branding Guide that’ll help startup breweries through every step of the branding process. We’ll begin working on our new website and along the way, take a long overdue look at our own branding and positioning. And while this task will never end, the next few years will be a process of determining what we want CODO to be in the not too distant future.

Do we want to continue being a small, nimble company? Valuing the level of craft, and including our clients in the creative process above all else?

Or do we want to become a medium-sized company? Six to ten employees. An actual HR policy, etc.

Or do we want to grow into a big company? Maybe Cody and I could wear business guy suits all day and monitor our stocks AND bonds while others do our bidding? (I have no idea what successful people do with their time. Hunt people for sport?)

In 2014, a law passed in Virginia designating a new class of craft brewery, the “Farm Brewery.” Exactly as it sounds, a Farm Brewery must grow some crops on the same land as the brewery. This can include tomatoes and cucumbers for the tasting room menu, or hops for the brewery itself. There’s little limitation which creates a wide open, exciting opportunity.

So in November 2014, we began working with Marty and his team to name, brand and position Virginia’s newest Farm Brewery, B Chord Brewing Co. We kicked off the process with a fun trip to beautiful Loudon County, VA and returned home to explore ideas surrounding the history of the area (heavily tied to bluegrass, jam music, and blues music), as well as agriculture, community, local art, and the idea of traveling to a destination brewery.

After a long naming process, we discovered a bit of old Bluegrass slang in “B Chord”—meaning that something is the best of the best. This fun piece of musical history perfectly matched the laid back concert venue component to the brewery.

Knowing the craft beer (and design) industry like we do, we realized that while the concept of a Farm Brewery might be novel right now, within the next 5 years, there will likely be dozens of them throughout Virginia. This meant thinking beyond common farm indexes for the overarching branding—no red barns, tractors, or roosters. This worked out well, because the name expressed a much more compelling, differentiated, and ownable attribute than simply being a brewery on an idyllic farm—the area’s tie to bluegrass history.

From there, we dove into art direction and identity design. Overarching ideas included a sense of history, an idyllic escape to pastoral farmland, and a hard to quantify musical coolness & funkiness. We looked at early bluegrass record sleeves and gig poster while experimenting with making sound visible. The final logo could just as easily be art from an old record as it could the maker’s mark inside a Martin guitar.

So far, we’ve developed the name and brand identity. On deck is a responsive website and full packaging line.

We had a fun time on this year’s N.I.T.E. Ride. 

Waaaay back in 2012, we took Neal Brown and the Pizzology team through our Hands-on Branding process en route to developing a new identity, launching an updated website, prototyping, designing, and redesigning a custom menu system, and churning out dozens of fun promotional pieces, including exhibition design (storefront signage and wayshowing) shirts, ads, and pizza boxes.

And unlike most of our projects, I’m embarrassed to say we never featured it. There was never a blog post or in-depth writeup because there was never a clean end to the work. Never a time when we could pause, take stock of what we’ve done and share it. And that extends to present day when we’re, right now, redesigning their website to be responsive and feature easy-to-use online ordering.  

So after all these years of our work being out in the wild (and 2 additional Pizzology locations opening), we thought we’d finally take a look back at the branding process to see how their messaging has evolved over time.

When we first started working with Pizzology, then a young restaurant, they were already doing many things people now take for granted. They were sourcing seasonally from local farmers. They were making many of their own ingredients in-house, including sausage, pizza dough, and cheese. And much of what they weren’t making themselves (or buying locally), they were sourcing direct from Italy. All of that combined and cooked in a wood-fired oven using traditional Italian methods made for some pretty damn good pizza.

The project kicked off with us spending a day in Pizzology’s flagship Carmel kitchen where we got the chance to make our own pizzas. Or try to make our own pizzas, at least. I distinctly remember hearing a line cook call my attempt a “sad Charlie Brown pizza.”

Along with that disheartening experience (I kid), we spoke with chefs, servers, customers, investors, advisors, distributors, and local farmers to identify several compelling messages and potential brand essences. Early on, it was determined that our biggest goal was to make fine dining more accessible. Some ideas to support this included:

1. Craft Pizza

excerpt from internal branding / positioning document:

“Transcending the Neapolitan style, this food represents an ethos – “Craft Pizza.” Top quality flour, freshly made mozzarella, hand-crafted and slow fermented dough, dry-aged meats and farm-fresh produce are all part of the story – but it’s the final product that matters.”

2. Local Farmers and Local Food

excerpt from internal branding / positioning document:

“While the local food movement suffers from buzzword overload, it’s easy to forget the heart of the matter – family farms are failing, people are getting sick from over-processed food, and animals are being raised in nightmarish conditions. When you support small, local producers, you actively choose to right these wrongs. That’s why Pizzology cares about Local; not to eliminate keywords from an arbitrary checklist, but to foster real change.”

3. Neighborhood Pub

excerpt from internal branding / positioning document:

“People need to feel like they’re part of a community. They need to be recognized, to feel important, and to belong. They need to be able to grab a drink in a safe place after a long, shitty day. An authentic sense of hospitality and familiarity is not something you’ll find at Chili’s, nor at the hottest new bistro in LA. Pizzology can build a community in the niche between impersonal chains and lofty fine dining establishments.”

4. Pizza 101

excerpt from internal branding / positioning document:

“There are some creative things happening at Pizzology. This is cool! But to most people, pizza is something that arrives in a cardboard box at the long end of a corporate supply chain. They probably don’t think or care much about this. To grow the Pizzology customer base, you have to teach people about Neapolitan pizza, perfectly charred crust and all. It can be fun; they might even like it. But this education component is every bit as important as the food itself.”

Each of these ideas informed mood boards that allowed everyone to gather around and openly discuss what they imagined the Pizzology experience should look and feel like, who it should serve, and what role it should play in their lives. After a lively conversation, the final brand essence of a “neighborhood pub” was chosen and everyone ripped the mood boards apart to build their own final art direction piece.  

That final mood board was a beautiful mix of the neighborhood pub, craft pizza, and pizza 101 brand essences. It called for a well designed identity, which in and of itself, speaks to an elevated dining experience. But not so overly designed and finicky that it draws attention to itself. A fine line that was toed by using a healthy dose of friendly snark to further take the air out of fine dining. That mood board hung on the wall in our studio, guiding us through the design process as we developed every bit of Pizzology’s communication over the last three years.

It was a fun place to take the messaging because you essentially have the food quality you’d expect from a fine dining experience in the relaxed atmosphere (and price point) of a local, lived-in favorite pub. And what better onramp, than craft pizza and beer? What’s more democratized than that? Keep your weird edible foams and twigs to yourself. This is pizza, man.

Anyway, it’s been a fun relationship and we’re happy to watch Neal, Erin, and the rest of the Pizzology team (and Neal Brown Hospitality Group, for that matter) develop into a much-loved Indiana restaurant group.

In 2011, we had the privilege of working with Neal Brown on branding The Libertine Liquor Bar. Widely regarded as one of the best restaurants and bars in the city, it was instrumental in Indianapolis’ burgeoning local food and independent restaurant scene as well as a stepping stone to many of the city’s new class of celebrated bartenders and restaurateurs.

While our branding work received a lot of press, it was quickly outshined by the bar program itself. Libertine became a destination bar for celebrities, travel writers, politicians and young foodies alike, and was even named one of the best cocktail bars in America by Esquire Magazine in 2013. 

Indianapolis has historically shied away from anything that’s not friendly and warm, “Honest to Goodness,” and all of that. That left ample room for dark, mysterious and frankly, weird branding. A dimly-lit shotgun-style bar played perfectly with the visual mashup of botanical illustrations, ex-pat poetry, the occult, and what it means to be a Libertine—debauchery and deviancy in both sex and drink.

Over the last few years, our city, and The Libertine itself, have evolved. What was once an expensive, sometimes unapproachable standing-room-only restaurant experience loosened its collars (and vest buttons) to become a bit rowdier. Over time, it became a place where you could grab a shot and a beer as well as one of the best cocktails in America. And the food program that Erin Till and Neal architected developed a cult following—bacon flights will do that.

With all of these things going on, Libertine still had to contend with a less than ideal location. A dearth of close parking (which is a big deal in car-loving Indy) as well as physical building issues left a lot to be desired. So when Neal and company successfully launched the Pizzology Mass Ave concept nearby that featured an unused basement, he jumped at the chance to move the entire bar several blocks north east.

And with this move would come slight changes to the concept. The renowned cocktail program remains, as does the food program, albeit scaled back. Now, the Libertine is a place where you’re just as welcome to settle in for a few hours as you are just stopping in for a quick beer as you make your way down Mass Ave. This new positioning called for a complete rebranding.

So our challenge was: what would the Libertine look like as a fun bar? As a “bar’s bar.” A place that you could order that shot and beer, or three, and settle in. A place that would still feature some of the best cocktails and food in the country, while being confident enough to not scream that fact from the rooftops (with fancy pants botanical illustrations and whatnot). What does the Libertine look like if it’s more fun? More inviting? More relaxed?

With that charge, we worked with Neal to take stock of everything we’d created for the original Libertine concept and decided that most of it needed to be jettisoned, starting with the dark, foreboding design work. A move to Mass Ave called for something brighter and more approachable. After a long identity design process, we ended up harkening to the same historic period of cocktail artistry, but dressed it down with a carnival-esque aesthetic—like a colorful old liquor bottle. And to our own chagrin, less snakes.

This culminated in an updated identity system (flexible type mark and friendly “L”icon), including a gorgeous hand-painted logo on the main entrance leading downstairs, subtle way showing throughout the space, a refined menu system, pared back, responsive microsite, and other fun ephemera like branded matchbooks.

We had a lot of fun at this year’s Bigger Picture Portrait Show. Held annually, this event has designers across Indiana redesign their favorite movie posters. These are then displayed and auctioned off in support of the Indy Film Fest.

Here’s a breakdown of our work:

Cody: Dredd from “Dredd”

Ryan: Zombie from “Dawn of the Dead, (1978)

Mike: T800 from “Terminator”

Excited to start working with Crafted Taste today. We’ll be working with Kat on a full rebrand and package design for this high end cocktail subscription box service over the next few months.