Image Credit : Photographed by Harris Farm & McCartney Design
Project Overview
Harris Farm’s West End Brisbane store celebrates the vibrancy and artistic culture of the area. It's inspired by street art, music, tattoos, and the sharing of favourite foods with friends and family. The central feature of the signage concept, 'The Vine,’ physically connects all of the signage moments in the store and also represents all of the connections within the community. The signage concept interprets the history of the area from the early market gardens where new neighbours brought new foods from their home lands, right up to the street art and celebrations of the present day. It asks the question, What will you bring to the party?
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Gary McCartney - Creative Director
Tarquin Willis - Design Director
Sinéad Kelly - Client Services Director
Lauren Gelling - Senior Designer
Maria Kirichenko - Senior Designer
Nerida Orsatti - Senior Designer
Ian Wells - Head of Marketing at Harris Farm
Grace Berg - Marketing Executive at Harris Farm
Darren Weir - Head of Property at Harris Farm
John Jan - Project Manager at Harris Farm
Mural artists: Jasmine Crisp, Kiel Tillman
Graffiti artist: Emmanuel Moore
Props and Installation: Prop House
Signage build and hand painting: Indigo Jo
Project Brief
The West End is now famously and unapologetically a vibrant cacophony of colour, flavours, lifestyles and opinions that is celebrated as a rich piece of Brisbane’s cultural jigsaw. It is also a suburb known for its outspoken residents and community groups.
McCartney Design were engaged to not only create engaging environmental navigation, but to tap into this local vibrancy. To uncover and celebrate local truths, Create an artistic narrative, engage and direct local artists, design graphics and bespoke signage installations. All coming together to add a layer of highly engaging, community driven artistic storytelling to a highly immersive retail space.
Project Innovation/Need
Our mission was to unite the shopping journey with engaging retail theatre driven by community engagement and local truths, both historic and new. Each key category or stage in the journey has its signage moment, tailored to that category and hand painted or crafted, in accordance with the Harris Farm brand philosophy. But how could we pull all of them together to create one story?
In a community like West End, everything’s connected. The past and the present. The different cultures and talents that come together to make it a cultural and artistic hub. The different ethnic groups that make it a melting pot. The entrepreneurs and businesses that have made the area their home. The gardens, farms and orchards that have fed people and given them a livelihood.
We envisaged creating something that’s always growing and adapting to its surroundings, and can connect everything. Like a vine. The vine was created from twisted green rope, defining the customer journey through the store and branching off to each and every one of the signage moments, holding all of the stories together.
Design Challenge
You name it the challenge was there!
Dozens of signage, graphic and environmental moments. A team of creative agents working on isolated components, coming together cohesively under enormous time pressure. Multiple install teams, mural artists, set designers, graffiti artists. Even a tattoo artist. Never mind the participation of local school kids who hand painted wooden flowers for the “Thank you” message at the registers.
And then there was the challenge of how to create the vine that spread over an entire large format Harris Farm! 2km of various gauge rope, dyed, hung, twisting and turning with internal wires.
A roller coaster of emotions, and the result? A unique food retail environment like never before. Quirky, colourful, a little bit weird, a little bit wonderful and EVERYTHING West End!
Sustainability
Sustainability is in Harris Farm’s DNA, from their championing of misshapen fruit to their up cycling of left over produce into drinks, smoothies and baked goods. For the signage installation, local artists and installers were engaged not only for authenticity, but to reduce cost of travel and carbon footprint. Recycled materials and ethically sourced timbers were used. Vinyl was out, hand painting was in. The use of plastic was extremely limited. Efficient LED lighting was employed through out. All non essential travel was scrapped in favour of online meetings.
Wayfinding
This award celebrates creative and innovative design in the ways people orient themselves in physical space, and navigate from place to place. Consideration given to signage and other graphic communication, clues in the building's spatial grammar, logical space planning, audible communication, tactile elements and provision for special-needs users.
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