The AIA Austin Homes Tour, 2009

24 years in the making, the AIA Austin receives a clean, modifiable identity system for promoting and touring their largest community event of the year, the AIA Austin Homes Tour.

Context is everything. The AIA Austin Homes Tour is a study of the most recent and best residential architecture in Austin each year. To promote the event, the selected studio cannot use images of a given work, images of a given architect, nor iconography that depicts a single style or period of architecture. How does one promote something you can’t depict?

Add to this challenge a mutual desire to develop an identity and “brand” for the tour that could remain in place for years to come, but allow for variation, modification, and adaptation over time while retaining a thread of consistency.

The solution was as reductive as possible. Focus on the tour, not the home.

Catalogue Front, postcards, posters.

Our logo form (or rather, the diagram) is generated by the relationship of each home to every other home on the tour. Not only will the tour map “logo” reveal itself differently each year, over time the combined logo diagrams will depict change, growth, and shifts in demography within the city of Austin.

Given the AIA’s commitment to the environment, we wanted to be sure we offered a strong statement and an environmentally sound solution to such a large print run. Based on page orientation—or which way you cut the sheet—the print run produces postcards, catalogue covers, and posters all from one parent sheet. In other words, we were able to eliminate as many as 4 other press plates and the energy and waste associated with their production and disposal. The result: a unified and consistent system delivered economically on a premium stock with integral color (truth in materials for the architects) and an FSC certification to the overall process. A gang run of color on FSC glossy stock inside completes the content of the catalog.

Through this shell, AIA Austin and FÖDA Studio in the future will simply need to select a new stock color and revise the logo diagram per that year’s selected tour, and the identity system is complete and revised. Voilà. Only the new photography and architects are needed.

We look forward to delineating the last 23 years of the Homes Tour—and those forthcoming—to show the evolution of the high level architecture that is putting Austin on the, well, map.

Abstract form generated by home tour locations.

Three years overlaid to show growth patterns.

Locations per Google Maps.

Catalogue back, postcards, posters.

Inside spread shows a fragment of a poster.

Spread, with client MJ Neal depicted.

We relied on the exceptional typeface Miniscule to give us back clarity and real estate on the page. Miniscule, designed by Thomas Huot-Marchand, was engineered for point sizes from 2 to 6.

Spread with client Webber+Studio depicted.

End page reveals another poster fragment.

Rear of poster shows fragments of catalog.

Press sheet: poster and postcard fronts.

Tickets on sale now.

Credits
Client: AIA Austin (Sally Fly, Director, Kristina Schlegel, Tour Chair)
Creative Director: Jett Butler
Design Team: Melissa Martin and Jett Butler
Production assistance: Sissy Emmons
Printer: The Whitley Company
Project Management and Web Development: Tina Schweiger for BlueShoeSpoonBend