This week we had fun researching pop-up shops. We found this book. We also started a Pinterest board of inspiring pop-up shop photos. Here’s our Pinterest board for the brand inspiration.

The holy grail of brand guides! I read all 100 pages of Walmart’s guide tonight…and I was fascinated!

When beginning to research this project, Kim ran accross a competition for retail design. We will use some of these competition guidelines to help set the peramaters of our project: Retail Design Institute Student Competition. We reached out to the director of communications and education for the Pacific Northwest chapter of the Retail Design Institute who has contacted some industry professionals to help aid us in our research. Kim and I also contacted some folks we know at some corporate retailers here in Seattle in hopes of gleaning some practical, professional knowledge.

As a second year student in the graphic design program at Seattle Central Community College, I have the opportunity to spend three quarters persuing a subject about which I am passionate and want to learn more. For the last ten years, I have been employed as a store-level retail manager, so it makes perfect sense that I could utilize my retail business knowledge in a design capacity to execute a project that can demonstrate  my refocused career direction.

A classmate of mine, Kimberly Jacobs, who has also had more than a decade of retail experience including store-level management and merchandising as well as store design, have decided to team up and tackle this project together. We will be creating an entire retail suite including logo design, a style/brand, visual, and merchandising guide, in-store collateral including hangtag, bags, and signage, etc., an e-commerce site, and design for a pop-up shop.

This blog will be a documentation of our process and progress in this endevour.