Luxe  

creative direction  |  art direction  |  design  

  

In 2015, The Annie Selke Companies developed a luxury line of Italian linens, and aptly named it Luxe. The marketing accentuates the exquisite detail of the product, from hand-beaded velvet to fine wool threads dipped in silver. Minimal typography and light touches of silver foil allows the gorgeously photographed product to take center stage.

The logo is a monogram of the initials of the company's founder and creative visionary, Annie Selke, based on late-19th- and early-20th-century ornamental alphabets.

Preliminary sketches showing various combinations of the two initials.

 For the final version, I simplified the two letterforms by hand and intertwined them, giving equal visual weight to each, into a single organic shape.

The catalog was next, which we shot over 4 days at an elegant historic property in upstate New York with a 10-person crew, led by photographer Sean McLaughlin. With only a month from our arrival on location to the in-hand date, we shot the entire 60-page book to a tight mockup using placeholder swipe and placed the final images and copy on location. 10 days later, we were on press.

The result is a simple, elegant oversized book that showcases the product and the location at which it was photographed, giving it an "ancestral home." The mark is stamped on the cover in silver foil on a full-bleed textural image of a silver-dipped wool throw.

The 2016 book was shot entirely in studio, using a custom set built to mimic the architectural detail of the original location.