From 2000 to 2006, myself and a small group of friends started an online forum for people to have a place to meet, discuss, and share Electronic music. There was nothing like it at the time and, really, at the start it was a selfish hobby to try to meet more people and find more music.
In the period between 2001 and 2006, I was part of a collective of artists and musicians in the Okanagan Valley. I took on the role of "Art Director" before I knew what the title was. We 3 friends started with only an online forum, and ended up with about 9 active crew members, 4 resident DJs, thousands of active members, a small clothing line, a weekly radio show, regular music nights, and a bi-weekly nighclub that we ran for a year. All of it was non-profit. The Liquidbeat Initative brough together thousands of people, gave many artists and musicians an outlet where they could explore their crafts, and intimately helped shape (and in some cases start) the careers of great DJs including DJ Joseph Martin, Stickybuds, Datsik, Excision, JPOD, Colin Syck, MissDVS, and Downlink to name a few.
We recognized early-on that we needed to have a recognizable logo. With the 6 founding members in place, we settled on a red cube as the logo, and it stuck with us for the entire project. To spread awareness and recognition, we crafted: stickers, embroidered badges, 1" red glass cubes, shirts, business cards, custom visuals for music events, posters, flyers, stencils, and much more.
Unfortunately, there isn't much left in terms of remaining evidence of the projects. We were young, and not very savvy about keeping our files in an orderly manner. STILL - you can check out the liquidbeat facebook page, which is lazily maintained with love by some of our original founding members.
Liquidbeat Business Cards
These business cards were one of the first branded pieces that were produced & were intended as dual purpose for both brand recognition, and hand-written link sharing for DJ mixes.
Liquidbeat T-Shirt Line
This was the placard that was designed to be placed above our shirts in stores. We had 4 racks in 3 stores and 1 kiosk in Kelowna BC. In retrospect, it was innundated with copy, and could be simplified quite a bit. But, it was early in my career and I felt it important to sell the product's features.
If I were to make this now, I would have condensed this in to a tag, and pinned it to the label inside each garment.
Spotted one of our shirts at an Art Gallery during a Kid Koala exibit.