Last friday the Lure crew took a brief field trip to Johnson’s Diner for lunch then to the Black Box. If you haven’t been to Johnson’s, you owe it to yourself to go. This soul food institution has been around for nearly 30 years. You won’t find any cremé fraiche or white truffles at Johnson’s, but you will find some of the best fried chicken, collards, oxtail, candied yams, mashed potatoes, cornbread and sweet potato pie in Central Florida.

After lunch we headed to the Black Box Collective, on Central near Parramore. It’s described as “a non-profit center for art, music and activism. A show space that is open to all people for use of skill shares alike.” This is a place where street artists hone their painting skills. As we approached, music was blasting from one of the small buildings that makes up the Black Box. Apparently they were preparing for an event that was to take place there later that night. We wandered the property admiring the paintings and tags that completely cover every building. There are several sculptures around the compound as well. After firing off a few frames, we headed back to the studio to finish up our day’s work feeling full and inspired.

Artists have been representing the nude human form for thousands of years, yet the word ‘nude’ draws attention anywhere, especially when one deems it a ‘Nude Nite’. Nude Nite captures that big city feel that is rare in our little city of Orlando. It’s always a great time to get our favorite peeps together, have a cocktail (or five!) and walk down to the show. It gets better with each year, growing to incorporate elements of dance, burlesque, music and body painting. Always over 200 works, including paintings, sculptures, and photographs, some that make us giggle, some that put us in awe, all celebrating the beauty of the nude. We partied like it was a Saturday night, forgetting for a moment that we actually had work to do in the morning, and enjoyed this awesome annual event our city has to offer!

An homage to the Battle of the Bulge movie poster.

The Florida Film Festival, produced by Enzian, is one of the premiere cultural events that takes place in Central Florida. The little festival that started in 1992 in Maitland, Florida has grown into one of the best regional film festivals in the country—featuring over 150 films in ten days. The festival hosts over 100 film industry professionals and over 25,000 attendees. Over the past 18 years, we’ve worked with the festival many times, developing advertising and collateral materials.  In recent years, this process has begun with a casual meeting of all the key players, sharing thoughts and ideas about the festival as a whole. Basically, we sit back and listen (with cocktails, of course)—occasionally asking questions or adding input to the conversation, taking in all we can. Out of this meeting, comes a pretty clear direction on where we should take the creative. This year, we landed on the festival’s reputation for having an unpretentious, warm, and welcoming atmosphere. Filmmakers and film-goers alike feel comfortable and at home at the Florida Film Festival. And so, the mission of the campaign was to a deliver a sense of home coupled with a sense of southern hospitality.

‘The South’ and ‘Florida’ are not exactly synonymous. The south is plantations, boiled peanuts, sweet tea, and big oaks. Florida is swamps, alligators, palm trees and beaches. So, in our creative exploration, some of our ideas had a more Floridian angle and some were more truly southern. We partnered with our pals at Think Creative and one of the first things that got us excited was the line, “Film Sweet Film.” An obvious play on “Home Sweet Home.” The idea of presenting the line in cross stitching seemed like an excellent way to give it the right southern feel, however, we did foresee a challenge of not making it feel like your grandma’s film festival.

These images are just concepts and not presented as final executions, so give us a break, we know these are pretty rough.

Then there were the more comedic southern lines about boiled peanuts and grits.

Another concept that came out of the process was the ‘fresh squeezed’ reference. For the most part, the festival features new films from young filmmakers. The fresh squeezed idea spoke clearly of that aspect of the festival’s content and becomes an obvious nod to fresh squeezed Florida orange juice with these visuals. The first of these would be a sort of refined orange crate label; the second, a more traditional orange crate label that would hopefully have gone a little bit kitsch in final execution; and third, a WPA style poster.

Another visual solution was to create a collage that brought together images that referenced the south and film. This was so we could invoke the feeling loosely without directly referencing that Florida was a part of the south.

One last thought we had was more silly than anything else. On researching, we had seen a few film festival posters where a person’s head was replaced with a camera. Looking at some record reviews, we noticed an album cover with a lone chicken on it. Why not a chicken with a camera in place of it’s head for our southern fried festival?

After presenting everything and much discussion, the client feedback was that they preferred  three concepts and wanted to know if they could be combined. A common request to which designers usually grumble, saying that what we do isn’t like buying Garanimals where you can mix and match everything. Luckily, one of the executions they liked was the collage. We figured we could easily combine the chicken with the ‘film sweet film’ in a collage, and here is the final result!

Last night we hosted a social event for It’s Better Together, a group of young, self-employed creatives seeking insight, inspiration, and networking opportunities. In addition, they are a group of really cool, smart, and inspired people. We did our best to share with them how and why our little studio got started; how Lure Design and L2 Design Collective, our sister company, fit together; and about our partnerships with Drive New Media and Think Creative. After some Q&A, we did a screen printing workshop where each participant got to pull a print to take home.

It was fun for us, and we hope it was fun for them, too. After all, everything is better together!