South Bay Abrams Art Direction, Catalog, and Website Design

I worked as Art Director for many years with South Bay Abrams (1999 – 2020). I took care of many projects in that time. Some highlights are: I updated the companies identity, directed and helped build (160) page print catalog, designed and maintained their websites, conceptualized grocery point of sale pricing systems, and designed their custom and retail food products labeling.

CATALOG & WEBSITE

Their catalog was a massive project. Many parts in inventory did not have imagery and the suppliers did not have access or the ability to provide content.

To remedy this hurdle, some items we photographed in house, and with others we rendered illustrations. When all is said and done, there where over 150,000 parts that we collated, defined, and described.

Some technical aspects to announce about this project:

With this site my intent was the majority of the base content on the home page utilizing CSS layers and animations to give the site more of an “App” feel. Note, this site was built prior to the mainstream uptake of website building platforms such as WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify. I hand coded this site from the ground up.
This project was being used as the preliminary stage in collecting assets that could be used in the second stage of building a database driven web store. The content collected was also added to the in inhouse inventory tracking program (MAS 200 by Sage)
The PDF catalog pages are purposefully text based and include metadata that allows for the sites search feature to find individual parts. Initially I used Google as the embedded search engine, but later found Bing Custom Search API a better option. I liked I could use it’s features on the backend and not brand the search results “Bing”. Also a benefit of this service is it does not serve auto placed advertisements (sometimes to competitors) to the customers.

PRICE TAGS & SIGNS

Price tags may just look like little plastics signs, but truthfully they are complex systems in a physical realm composed of interchangeable components that need to effectively integrate in order to correctly convey abruptly changing information in an expediatory manner.

FOOD PRODUCTS LABELING

South Bay Abrams has its own line of food products as well as producing private label recipes.

Here’s a selection of some of the labels and logos I designed over the years.