After playing with a heart and down-pointing arrow combination I ultimately rejected, I did a little web-surfing and came across diagrams of the electron shells for the three minerals and combined them into a graphic that I ultimately tweaked into the new logo.

There are currently four flavors of Enabiane (lemon, orange, mint and anise). I designed the lemon box using tints and shades of pure yellow, intending the other three flavors to have the same design with different color families, and selected a collection of Swis721 typefaces for the text. I thought it had a nice, clean, credible feel and used a version with a nice squarish chunkiness to give a little weight to the product name.

The rendering above left doesn’t display one of the package’s features, which is that the yellow strip on the front is scored and tears off, allowing the consumer to stand the box upright on a shelf or countertop and extract the individual packets as needed without opening and closing the box itself.

The gradient background colors I appropriated from an image found over at Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog that I posted on at my personal blog. I used one of the more iconic shots of Gershwin, a photo by Edward Steichen, as the starting point for the illustrations, extending the black mass formed by the piano through the middle and final piece. The script for the subtitle was taken from a draft card found over at flickr and then traced and pieced together to form the words required.

Initial sketches for the logo alternated between those incorporating elements of the building’s architecture and the layout of the building and surrounding streets and others playing on the shape of the words in “2 Columbus Circle.” Ultimately, I went with the latter concept, although the former concepts were used in the cover artwork for the restaurant menu and in the concierge brochure (the square with four dots is found on the corner edges of the building) and the magazine advertisement (the rounded key shape rings the street level entrance).

Given the instruction to create a narrative based on a subject of personal interest, I decided to explore the evolution of my work through collage. My first instinct was to assemble all of the pieces that had some personal significance to me since the beginning of my design days in 1999 on through the present, with “significance” defined as either a personal favorite or representing a milestone of some kind. I liked the earliest rounds (see below), but found the finished piece too cluttered, given the size limitations involved in the brief. I scrapped that work and started over and stuck to a single piece per year, using a variety of Photoshop tools and techniques to achieve the above.

Just a fun little exercise in using different tools to create an illustration out of “nothing,” or, in this case, a cocktail monkey and an eraser I won playing Skeeball at Coney Island.

The thought here was just to create visual noise by having these overlapping circles consisting of the word “noise” in orange and blue. The noise crowds and envelopes the white space in the center.