Sole Agent
A logotype, mark, site, and stationery for former Billy Sunday Creative Director Alex Bachman, as he delves deeper into his own passion for difficult–to-find spirits. Sole Agent’s mark is a play on Chicago’s six-pointed star combined with a guilloche’s linework and detail. The site is a simple affair in WordPress with copious educational material sent to […]
Yusho
From the restaurant’s inception in 2011 to 2014, Pretty designed and communicated in public as Yusho, one of a series of restaurant concepts setting up camp in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood. Executive Chef Matthias Merges, just off 15 years of experience as Chef de Cuisine at Charlie Trotter, imagined an elevated izakaya with balanced cocktails and Chicago-meets-Japan […]
Gawker Media
From 2003 to 2011, we were Gawker Media’s de facto visual & interface design department. We designed and built the first five iterations of the company’s 13 notorious sites, developing branding, editorial styling, visual voice, and CMS functionality for each. Not every site remains online, but those which do still retain the brands we built. […]
Nima
Nima is the first portable sensor for food allergens that returns your test results in 2 minutes with 99.9% accuracy. In early 2015, Pretty developed, with Nima’s small crew, a custom typeface, mark, palette, language for Nima’s values, and design & language for a holding site, and later its initial site. Nima’s typographic and visual marks came […]
Billy Sunday
Billy Sunday is a cocktail bar from Chef Matthias Merges in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, helmed by Creative Director and Jean Banchet Award-winner Alex Bachman,featuring pre-Prohibition cocktails and light fare. Pretty created Billy Sunday’s branding, sales materials, menu and events site, advertising and social media messaging, beginning with austere typography based on broadsheets and posters of the […]
Reverend Billy’s Chop Shop
How to create signature brand imagery for a salon known for precision cuts and brilliant color, when we didn’t know where or how they’d be used? Make them kaleidoscopic with a square format and a central composition.