LP/w Design Studios, Interior and Graphic Design - Film

(upbeat music) - If you've think of each brand as a personality there's so many ways to express it. (upbeat music) - I'd always been interested in interior design and the person who occupies the building. What their interfacing with on a daily basis. Things that they're touching, feeling, doing, that's what I wanted to implement. (upbeat music) - I feel fortunate that I always liked to make stuff. The thing that I strive for in my work is to combine both the digital and analog or have that handmade feel to it. - From our clients is where I get the most inspiration. I am always thinking about what makes those people interesting; what makes them different and how we can bring it into the design itself. (upbeat music) - My first design jobs were corporate communications style design. Over time, I've done more environmental branding and then we started LP/w. (upbeat music) - We have our separate disciplines, but the sweet spot is when we work on projects together and where we feel like we are most effective. When we joined forces, we wanted to do both environmental as well as branding as one continuum. But offering both, we're kind of bridging that gap as opposed to having the client do most of the account management from one point firm to the next. - We feel like in order to be a really effective brand that you do have to go deep. Why is this important? Why did they do this day in and day out? And then that understanding of why they do it helps us tell why you should come to this coffee company. Why they care. (upbeat music) - Brand go through challenges the same way people do. Brands go through a midlife crisis. Brands go through identity crisis. Marriage counseling when two companies come together and for Stone Creek they were going through a bit of a midlife crisis. They needed to figure out what they were going to be about for the second half of their existence. - We loved their coffee. We actually really like the experience and their baristas were very friendly. We went to their website and they were saying some really interesting things that they believe in and that they are a part of, but then we were just like, "Wow, that does not translate", in where people who look for that type of thing. So it inspired us to give Eric Resch a call, who is the founder and the owner of Stone Creek Coffee and just say, you know, you're doing fine, but there's some stories here that aren't being told and we think your business could be more successful with our help. (upbeat music) - We wanted any customer to walk in there and know without being told, "Wow, these guys are into it." "They are passionate about what they're doing." - Coffee does drum up passion. People like coffee; they really like it. That being the case, we wanted to have a space that they could geek out. - The idea of surveys is there's a new one every month where they cross over the line from just being simple consumer to participating. - And while they're waiting for their coffee, they could read coffee factoids on the inspiration wall and learn something new. (casual electronic music) - For Stone Creek specifically, the idea is raising craft to a level of art. And that's why we chose to do these drawings in a traditional fashion as opposed to computer renderings. They start off with either rough sketches where it's just a straight up line drawing and then from the line drawing we add the shading. And the shading is usually on a separate sheet so that when I scan it in, I scan in the individual sheets and color correct them and get the levels right. This is all Photoshop, which is a scanned and then the watercolor effect is on a white paper and has the multiply filter on it so you get this kind of wash effect the way it fades off. This was a book that I made a long time ago. It's really old and what I would do is I would keep, I would keep a box of random like newspaper clippings and bus passes and I got in the habit of drawing or making something per page every night. No matter what I was doing, I could be watching T.V. not paying attention, but the idea was that I would just randomly grab stuff and just like pluck it on a page and try to create something out of it. And what happened over time and something that I noticed over time was that because I got in the habit of just making stuff whether it was good, bad, ugly, beautiful, I became comfortable with ugly. And as a designer, especially a commercial designer, you're so used to like making beautiful or striving to make beautiful things that to make something interesting, you have to make something ugly every now and then or be comfortable with ugly. And so this thing for me was a big part of being comfortable with accidents and being comfortable with handmade stuff, so anyway, this goes on and on, but this thing had such a big effect for me that making stuff by hand is still very much a part of what I do. (upbeat music) - When I started in architecture, I was hand drafting, so I still do a lot of sketching. Initial ideas, broad strokes, and then I always take it into AutoCAD; bring things into sketch up. When I was a junior designer in architecure, computer drafting was just... I felt and I explained to my employers as I got older that that was the biggest waste of their money and my time. I'm not a computer person. I'm not somebody who likes to figure things out all night. I do like to be out and about with people and giving them what they ultimately want. (upbeat percussion music) - Circa 1880 is a really great example of understanding what the client wanted the experience for the public to be. Thomas the chef and owner came to us. He had the name for the restaurant, 1880, because that's when the building was built. - And we kind of asked, how does that name go to the food that you're doing. And he said, "Oh, not at all." It's all new; it's all new concepts and everything and then when we started asking him about his technique and what he's doing, it was very clear that much like the inventions that were happening in the 1880s, he was doing that with his cuisine. - Which was this kind of participatory, watching him pour sauces and watching him kind of make final preps to the plate. - So he was tinkering and he was inventing and he was changing things up. - The artwork for 1880 was patents from a lot of the inventions made at that time, like Edison's lightbulb. But the wall graphics were a different solution because we wanted to have a mural painted or applied to the soffit, but the client didn't have a budget to accommodate for that, so if you look closely they are 1117 or tabloid size pages that we pasted to the wall and then treated with paint and made it look like it had a folded map feel to it. Milwaukee is very casual. We wanted the brand to be as much about invention as about just kind of like relaxed environment, so the inventor's workshop started feeling much more appropriate, not only for what Thomas wanted to do, but also for what his audience would like. (upbeat music) - LP/w has been asked to help out with the interiors and the lighting for Hotel Northland in Greenbay. Hotel Northland began as a hotel back in the 20s. We are in large part restoring and then we are also just making it more of a modern boutique hotel that has the amenities that we need now. So the rooms were 300 rooms and we are now changing that to 160 rooms, so they're going to be much larger with lots of suites on every level. We are taking queues from vintage sports clothing, meaning that we'll have lots of tufted leathers, lots of stitching. We have backlit mirrors; we have marquees, which are kind of indicative of the 1920s architecture that this is, but also it really can stand for today. It's going to be high end, but not pretentious. It's not going to be too stuffy and really nothing can be. People will feel very comfortable coming in here in their jerseys. (upbeat music) LP/w literally stands for Libby Patrick Winnie. Winnie's our first daughter. We get the comment all the time, I could never work with my husband or I could never work with my wife. - And our answer is inevitably, then don't. - Yeah. - Don't please. - Good idea. Remember that thought. - The fact that we respect each one's disciplines and expertise in that discipline makes it workable. I could totally understand if we were both graphic designers or if we were both interior designers, how there would be like some butting of heads, but the fact that we trust one another is what really makes it work. (upbeat electronic music) Owning our own business, though we do put in a lot of hours, it does give us the flexibility to be with our kids and be together more than if we had our individual jobs at different design firms. - We didn't jump off the deep end right away. Both of us worked at our respective jobs and then we would work on things together until 3 o'clock in the morning, you know and we really wanted to make sure that we could make that leap from working for someone else to working for ourselves together. - We made a promise to one another that, you know, the way this will work is if there's a burn the boats attitude. We cannot look back. We cannot have regrets of not being part of a company or anything like that. It has to be about making this business, so this idea of only moving forward is what really drives us and because it's not only for ourselves, but for our family, it's the best motivator. (upbeat music)