Cake At Work
Around 2010, when the AEC (among other industries) took a serious down turn, the firm I worked for found itself having to close. This was my official pivot into a freelance career. I began working with an entrepreneur (the dapper gentleman on the red phone) who had an idea that was strange enough to immediately interest me: build a food business around hotcakes on a stick.
There was an idea. And there was me, still very much at work, discovering in the margins of my professional life what it felt like to build something completely different. And fold in being paid for menu tastings for the first time, there was quite literally, cake at work.
There in comes the phrase. The phrase also captures something else that was happening. Freelance design gave me a new kind of freedom - permission to experiment, follow strange ideas further than I normally could, move between discipline and discovery.
Work could be serious without always feeling serious. "Cake at work" became a little shorthand for that feeling.
My Sweet Lil' Cakes
The business became My Sweet Lil' Cakes, a Seattle food concept built around sweet and savory hotcakes served on a stick.
The product was playful, portable and unusual enough that the business surrounding it needed to helppeople immediately understand what they were encountering.
That made the project much more interesting to me than simply creating a logo. We were creating a personality around a new product category. The identity needed to feel spirited enough to match the food. The mobile environment needed to attract attention. The menu, language, graphics and customer experience all needed to reinforce the same idea.
My formal background was in architecture, where I had been trained to think about more than surfaces: circulation, sequence, hierarchy, human behavior, materials, context and the relationship between one decision and the next. A building has to work as a system. It turns out, so does a brand.
Until then, I hadn't fully recognized how transferable my architectural training was. With My Sweet Lil' Cakes, the product itself was unconventional. That meant the surrounding experience had to do more than make it look appealing. It had to explain the idea quickly, give it personality and create enough coherence that a customer could understand the business almost instinctively.
What should this thing feel like? Who is it for? How does someone move through the experience? What happens when the logo, the vehicle, the menu, the language, the customer interaction and the food itself all tell the same story? These weren't just graphic-design questions. These are brand experience questions.
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A logo can identify a business. A brand helps the business behave.
The visual personality informs the environment. The environment affects the customer experience.
The customer experience influences the language. The language creates recognition.
Recognition begins building trust. That's the secret sauce = a trusted brand.
You are no longer decorating a company, you are constructing a world around an idea.
And when that world is coherent enough, other people know how to enter it.
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That lesson has followed me through almost every kind of creative work I've done since; brand identity, campaigns, architecture, environmental graphics and experiential design.
I still delight in he same thing I encountered while working on the little cake business in Seattle: a product, service, or place in need of a trustworthy, recognizable experience.
My Sweet Lil' Cakes was the first time I saw myself do that. Since then, I've worked with restaurant groups on established quick service restaurants as well as original food concepts.
That's why, years later, the name cakeatwork is still here. It became the reminder of how I like to work:
hungry enough to follow an idea, serious enough to build a system around it, and always fun enough to leave room for a little cake.
