One of our favorite traditions rolls around each Monday.

At noon, the whole crew piles into Zoom from New York, San Francisco, Boulder, London, Hawaii and Woods Hole to chat, share updates and, most importantly, pass The Bouquet.

The Bouquet is an honor handed off to the most deserving team member from last week’s recipient. It can be for anything from nailing a key presentation to untangling a knotty problem to bringing the best energy to the office.

COLLINS Design Director Farbod Kokabi just three-peated.

It’s unprecedented, but unsurprising.

Farbod has impeccable taste, a contagious imagination, an outsized heart for his craft and colleagues, and easily, easily, the best hair game around.

He’s worked with the likes of Sony, A24 and Coca Cola. He co-owns and operates his own record label. He hits it out of the park for us week in and week out and, now, he has a new gig…

Farbod is joining the remarkable jury at this year’s Brand Impact Awards, including our good friends Lisa Smith, Kwame Taylor-Hayford and Liza Enebeis.

Well chosen, BIA.

If you haven’t already, there’s still time to submit your work for Farbod and company to take a look.

Best of luck.

💐💐💐

DesignWeek in London just named our work with the IIT Institute of Design as 2023’s Rebrand of the Year.

We are thrilled the recognition came in Rebranding—transforming brands for a new future is what we love to do.

But it was not the news we expected to wake up to, today.

It is bonkers, and an especially pleasant surprise because the cast of honorees we find ourselves included among is remarkable.

On behalf of our clients and our crew, we are beyond grateful to this year’s jury.

And congratulations to the good people at The Click, Ragged Edge, Magpie Studio, NB Studio, WeTransfer and all of this year’s Design Week winners.

You can see everybody, here.

Thank you, Design Week.
Thank you, to our incredible friends and clients at the Institute for their imagination in embarking on such a meaningful transformation.

And bravo, all.

This spring, Fast Company invited us to help launch a new feature series–REBRAND. The concept? For each upcoming print issue, take something that desperately needs a transformation and reimagine it; new strategy, new story, new name, new identity. Recasting it to play a more meaningful role in building the futures we all hope to see.

These transformations happen all the time, often quietly, and with ambitions that are questionable as frequently as they are helpful. Gambling has become “Gaming.” Junk Bonds re-skinned as “High-Yield.” PFAS are increasingly known, much more memorably, as “Forever Chemicals.” And the Patagonian Toothfish on your menu is now the far more appealing “Chilean Sea Bass - fresh from the clear, icy cold waters off the coast.”

It’s a grab bag.

The intent of REBRAND is to point out that, whatever their angle, these shifts can have a real impact. And to ask the question: How do we turn more of them to the world’s benefit?

For the inaugural topic, Fast Company gave us GMOs. Tricky waters, indeed.

See our thinking, here.

TEAM
Indgila Samad Ali
Dev Valladares
Tom Elia

Good things come in threes.

D&AD has shortlisted our work with the good people at Figma, Freeform and the Institute of Design.

Cheers to our teams, cheers to our remarkable clients and thank you, judges.

COLLINS Senior Designer Emily Sneddon possesses a rare mix of even rarer traits.

It’s a dangerously balanced cocktail:

Equal parts sharp, driven, insanely talented, tasteful, caring, committed. With a healthy pour of hustle.

And it’s a knockout.

Creative Bloq sat down with her to talk work, growth and words of wisdom.

You can find the full story, here.

At COLLINS, we may surf Pinterest and Are.na less than you would expect. And for good reason. Brian Collins is on the record saying:

“In the process of designing and creating and writing and coding and building and crafting and launching our work, we use many tools for exploration and inspiration.

We use our library, films, animation, travel, painting, theatre, drawing, hiking, dancing, cooking as well as interviews and conversations with our clients and their customers. There are so many different kinds of references and visual stimuli that it is hard to keep track of them all.

But if there is one thing that we have never used it is this:

Mood boards.”

So, it felt fitting when our friend Eve Peyser at The New York Times reached out to Brian for his thoughts on just that subject.

See the full story here.

Our friends at Design Week asked design leaders where investment in our industry needs to be directed to keep the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals within reach.

Taamrat Amaize, Chief Strategy Officer at COLLINS, was among them. As usual, she landed several key points.

See the her thoughts, here.

Join us as Brian Collins speaks about transforming the future of brand at Columbia Business School’s annual BRITE Conference.

April 10, 2023.

If you haven’t heard, Pepsi has a new look.

If you haven’t seen, everyone has thoughts.

Our friend Tim Nudd at Ad Age did the work to gather opinions from around the industry.

You can see Brian Collins’ take as well those from Pum Lefebure, Hamish Campbell, Andy Cooke, Craig Dobie, Yihuang Zhou, Howard Belk, Maria D’Amato, Meg Jannott, Amin Todai, Adriana Ivory, Stephanie Yung, Nicole Massaro, Greg Auer, Stephen Niedzwiecki, Carlos Ortega, Zack McDonald and Neil Cooper.

It’s all here.

Our friends at PRINT sat down with COLLINS Creative Director Joseph Han to discuss the new “We ❤️ NYC” logo.

“People freaked— and are freaking— out. Everyone has a take, and everyone is more than happy to tell you about it. Maybe all the noise is warranted, but that’s not for me to call.

What is warranted is an examination of the response itself, especially for graphic designers. Look at what a logo just did, what a piece of graphic design just did — an entire city of busy, hustling, no-nonsense New Yorkers just threw a tantrum. Not to mention the rest of the world.

That’s remarkable.

Clearly, Milton Glaser’s iconic original logo is embedded in the nerve bundlings and memory banks of this city and people around the globe.

So, we can debate the execution of this new mark, but for me, it is of far more interest and consequence to talk about the unseen and often unfelt role of graphic design in the places we call home.”

See the rest of his thoughts here.