We recently had the privilege to work together with our friends at Neenah Paper and Unisource Worldwide to create the print collateral for an event co-created with AIGA Chicago. We created “collector coins” for an amazing panel event featuring some amazing designers in Chicago — including Steve Liska, Katherine Walker, Bart Crosby, Alisa Wolfson, Dawn Hancock, and moderator Rick Valicenti. You can see the project details here.

This news has already been announced, but we are sufficiently humbled and honored enough to talk about it in this space too. We’re excited to mention that our work for AIGA Chicago and Unisource on the AIGA Voices piece has been chosen as an FPO Award winner! The FPO Awards are an outgrowth of the design and production blog, FPO, run by Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio of UnderConsideration. FPO and the rest of the “blog family” created by UnderConsideration have been favorites of ours for many years. We’re thrilled to be chosen in this year’s FPO Awards, and look forward to seeing all of the other winners in the upcoming printed book.

We’ve been pretty quiet on the blog of late, but it’s only because we’ve been knee-deep in some great projects.

One of the latest pieces to launch continues the work we’re doing with Golden Apple Foundation. Our most recent direct mail collaboration is hitting mailboxes across Illinois and around the country this week. The vertical accordion fold piece highlights the great work Golden Apple is doing in transforming teachers and teaching. Their mission is fantastic, and we’re proud to have them as clients.

Video games are no longer a niche market. They’re big business, having long-since eclipsed Hollywood blockbusters in revenue. Culturally, we’ve grown used to video game franchises with their own storylines, plots, and characters — a complex web of merchandising, marketing, and gameplay.

It’s easy to forget that these paths were forged by a cast of simple, clever little characters of ’80s videogames. Their screen time may have been short, but Pac-Man, Q*Bert, Mario, and many other characters were bursting with personality, fun, and an ethos that we wanted to capture in the book, SUPER iam8bit: More Art Inspired By Classic Video Games of the ’80s. With our client-partners and co-publishers, iam8bit, we designed the entire volume, helped curate the mass of excellent artwork, and launched our creative imprint, Plastic Highway.

For more details about this project, power up to our iam8bit portfolio page.

And if that’s not enough ’80s video game goodness for you, be sure to check out iam8bit’s 5th art show in Los Angeles, where the book will be officially released and available for sale.

Our print collateral work for iam8bit is now up in our portfolio, so take a look.

Some projects fall outside of the realm of client work, and at Hexanine, we do some of this to keep ourselves sharp, to pursue unique interests, and to grow our capabilities. We’re launching a creative imprint called Plastic Highway as a place to showcase creative efforts that exist at the intersection of art and pop culture. Check out our portfolio entry for more on the identity we designed, and watch this space for an upcoming announcement on the first project released under the Plastic Highway banner.

We’ve just added our poster series project for iam8bit to the Hexanine portfolio. Follow the link for more iconographic video game fun.