Featured Project: WORKSBUREAU

Every now and then we truly get to live up to our name and include everything but the kitchen sink in a project. And those projects are often the most rewarding.

We had a chance to do just that with WORKSBUREAU, a Phoenix-based architectural firm. WORKSBUREAU is the successor to the renowned will bruder+PARTNERS after Bruder and the other partners in the firm — Ben Nesbitt, Richard Jensen and Rob Gaspard — agreed to an amicable split.

Nesbitt, Jensen and Gaspard retained most of the staff and clients of the firm, and wanted to create a new brand identity that would stand out in an extraordinarily creative industry while reintroducing it to prospective clients around the world. So they called on Kitchen Sink Studios to help them start from scratch — including a new name, brand identity, business system and web site, complimented by professional photography that would capture the character of the firm and its team.

Step 1, of course, was the name. And there were literally dozens of options on the table. The partners gravitated toward WORKSBUREAU in the end because it had a unique sound rolling off the tongue and provided an interesting way to tell the firm's story. This initial phase included professional photography, securing and developing a SPLASH page to be utilized while the rest of the project was being developed. Here's how that was translated online:

Eventually, the front page of their web site would simply feature the dictionary definitions of the two merged words, leaving the reader to make the connection while viewing the work:

works noun \ˈwərks\

1. things produced or accomplished by effort, exertion, or exercise of skill

2. things produced by the exercise of creative talent or expenditure of creative effort : artistic production

bu·reau noun \ˈbyu̇r-(ˌ)ō, ˈbyər-\

1. writing desk; especially : one having drawers and a slant top

2. commercial agency that serves as an intermediary especially for exchanging information or coordinating activities

Next came the brand identity, which actually was developed relatively quickly and easily out of the naming process. The WORKSBUREAU team liked the look of the word in a sans serif font in all caps, combined with clean design that would later allow for a focus on their projects rather than the brand identity itself. And, the Kitchen Sink team developed a bright, cheerful and energetic color palette to accentuate the new brand.

"We wanted to do something that would give them a lot of flexibility, and be distinguished without taking away from where the real focus should be," said Doug Bell, Creative Director for Kitchen Sink Studios. "But we also wanted it to have a friendly feel, to reflect on what it's like to work with their team, so we went with some really bright spot colors to make the business system professional but fun."

With the new brand in place, the Kitchen Sink team then began work on developing the kind of web presence that would showcase the company's work in a truly interactive and compelling way. The site would be all about the work itself, with the story told through professional photography of both the WORKSBUREAU team and its exceptional projects.

The Kitchen Sink team developed a site that brings the company's work to life in front of the viewer's eyes and allows the viewer to explore the wide variety of projects WORKSBUREAU has completed around the world.

"Because of the complexity of the design, WORKSBUREAU.com is one of our most ambitious sites to date,"said Dan Freeman, Kitchen Sink Studios' Lead Web Developer. "We had to create a fully responsive site that was extremely image heavy. It also had to have a CMS backend that could easily be updated by the WORKSBUREAU team after launch. All of these elements together can bring load times to a crawl.

The site even allows the user to choose which of the accent colors they prefer for viewing the site — which is designed to be indicative of the level of detail and the quality of the experience of interacting with the company's works. And, it contains content-management features in several sections that allow the WORKSBUREAU team to make additions and changes to the site from any standard web browser.

"We developed a site architecture that would only feed the appropriate sized images for the user's screen size to keep the site fast even on slow mobile networks. This combination of CSS media queries and jQuery responsive images were all built on WordPress, which is something that is one-of-a-kind on the web today."

The Kitchen Sink Studios team is very proud of the work completed for WORKSBUREAU in helping to create their new brand and web presence, and enjoyed the process of working with this exceptional group of professionals. We look forward to seeing what kind of innovative, imaginative architecture they will continue to produce!

Featured Project: New branding and responsive web site for Fox Restaurant Concepts

How do you take a hip company with its own corporate identity and 12 separate and individual brands, rebrand the parent company in a compelling way without detracting from the other brands, and create a web site that puts them all together in one place — and is completely mobile-friendly?

That was the challenge the Kitchen Sink Studios team was given by Fox Restaurant Concepts, which hired us to redo the company's brand identity and create a new corporate web site that showcases the 12 different restaurant concepts the company operates.

And it wasn't a rebrand of Corporation X. Fox Restaurant Concepts is known throughout the region as the creator of some of the most exceptional dining experiences around. Our mission was to convey their sense of quality, style and design not just for the corporate brand, but for each one of the individual restaurant concepts as well.

Step 1 was the brand, and we realized that we needed to create something visually compelling but that wouldn't detract from the other brands. It had to be complementary, strong on its own but not the focus of attention. We created a variety of different concepts, but owner Sam Fox gravitated toward cleaner looks with dark color palettes, and with the flexibility to be used in a variety of different settings. The look you see here is now being incorporated throughout the organization, and is a dramatic change from their previous brand identity, which had grown dated. 

Sam Fox reviewing some of the initial branding concepts. 

Some of our initial design concepts. 

The approved brand identity.

Now, the web site, which you can view here. The site needed to check the following boxes:

• Provide key information about the company.

• Spotlight each of the restaurant concepts, with a focus on their individual brands.

• Visually represent the experience of dining at each restaurant.

• Functionally provide all the information a customer may need, including hours, locations, reservation information and anything else.

• Provide a variety of other services, including group events, gift cards, promotions and events and feedback forms.

Oh, and it needed to work not only on desktop, but on tablets and mobile devices as well.

The solution was a responsive-coded site that adapts to the size of the viewer's screen, whether on a smart phone or a computer monitor. The site also includes a great deal of high-quality professional photography — the vast majority of which was taken by David Fox, Sam Fox's brother and a terrific photographer.

The site includes a full back-end content management system that allows almost all content on the site to be updated through WordPress with any web browser, making it easy for the Fox team to edit items that change on a regular basis, such as menus and hours. They can even easily add new locations, a critical feature for the fast-growing company.

It's the most complicated site our team has built in HTML5 (which we use exclusively these days; we did some pretty complex sites in Flash back in the day), and it was a great way for our web team to flex its muscles when it comes to building a site that works on the full spectrum of devices.

We're very pleased with the new look we created for Fox Restaurant Concepts. Now if you'll excuse us, working with all these great restaurants has made us hungry...