Darden Studio is a renowned digital type foundry, creating fonts used by major brands and campaigns across the world like AT&T, Mazers, Crayola, Bernie Sanders, and Hearst. With the new releases of Kit and Gamay, the studio needed a way to promote their new fonts. The primary challenge of promoting these new fonts is that nothing has been made with them yet. Fonts are a material, something that you make things with. So naturally, I worked with Joyce Ketterer and Quinn Keaveney at Darden Studio to make these artifacts.
+17% Website traffic
+2x Adobe activations
With the marketing efforts I have been involved with over the past year, there have been sizable improvements in the traffic and activations of new Darden Studio releases. Merch has been a key part of the marketing strategy, creating a delightful touchpoint for conference and meetup attendees.
The Kit Pin
With Darden Studio merch being handed out for promotions at conferences and meetups, we wanted something that people could engage with. Something that would be visible and have utility. Pronoun pins were the perfect artifact to create for these events. We also wanted to create one pin, a spinner or slider, to accommodate different pronouns. After numerous iterations we broke down the 3rd person subject pronoun into their parts and found we could make a slider that contained the letters “t”, “s”, and “y” on the back plate and “he” on the front plate, revealing different letters for each pronoun.
Photography by Paulina (Pau) Pedraza for Darden Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.
The resulting pin is compact and versatile, yet it displays the pronoun prominently when worn.
Photography by Paulina (Pau) Pedraza for Darden Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.
Merch will be available from Darden Studio’s website soon if you want to get your hands on your own Kit pin.
Contains Multitudes Gamay Tape
With the success of the Kit pins, Darden Studio wanted an item for the release of Gamay. After substantial ideation with the Darden Studio team tape was the idea that stuck. We had originally looked into washi tape of different widths for each of Gamay’s widths but landed on packing tape that says “CONTAINS MULTITUDES” — a reference to Walt Whitman’s poem Leaves of Grass as well as whatever might be packed inside a box wrapped in this tape.
Photography by Paulina (Pau) Pedraza for Darden Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.
Photography by Paulina (Pau) Pedraza for Darden Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.
