Hardworking art.
Earlier this year, we became our own clients and completed the daunting task of refreshing and redefining the Crowley Webb brand. And after arriving at a new position – ‘Hardworking’ – our next task was figuring out how to bring it to life.
So we thought. And sketched. And wrote. And argued. And had a couple of beers. To the casual observer, it may not have looked like much was happening, but we were doing hard work, just like the stevedores and steelworkers of Buffalo’s past. OK, they probably worked a lot harder than us. But we were on to something – some intersection of our city’s history, hard work, and effective, unforgettable communication. And what did that look like to us? Three little letters: WPA.
The Works Projects Administration was a depression-era government initiative designed to put people to work. Among other things, artists and designers employed by the WPA created materials to promote industry, creating a visual vocabulary celebrating work and workers in the process.
Enter wildly talented illustrator Mike Gelen. Mike has a special affinity for, and proficiency with, the very style of art we were looking for. A few concept meetings later, he was sketching feverishly, bringing our messages to life with iconic, WPA-style imagery.
Once the art was done, we decided it worked best presented in the kinds of context where it would have originally appeared, like posters, or even oversized murals. Through the magic of Photoshop, and with the help of our pal Warren Stanek, we produced an image of our venerable building enhanced by a gigantic, hand-painted mural and put that image on the homepage of our new website. Thinking we were done, we occasionally joked about really doing such a mural on the side of our building. The jokes became more frequent, and, at some point, we realized we weren’t joking at all. So we got hold of painter Mike Mammana and put him to work.
Just a few weeks later, he and his crew have completed the job. Now we have an unforgettable expression of our new brand position and downtown Buffalo has a new landmark that both evokes the city’s heyday and looks optimistically toward its future. It took a lot of creative people doing a lot of work to pull it off, but that, as they say, is the whole idea.
Tagged with art, Crowley Webb, linkedin, mural