Our Favorite Designs, Year in Review 2019

2019 was one of our busiest years, and our production team produced many great works of art and graphic design. Throughout the year, we designed ads for our flagship magazine; various gorgeous story layouts; magazine covers; animations for client campaigns; client videos from trade shows and for company overviews, which we call Behind the Greens; humble yet crucial email ads; even packaging and trade show booths. Today, we'd like to review our design work from 2019, give credit, and explain why we think these picks exemplify our best efforts. In all honesty, it was really difficult narrowing these down, and we probably missed some due to space constraints. That being said, we're looking forward to trying to top ourselves in 2020. Thank you for checking it out! 

Well, this ad is one of our best from the year, and you can plainly see why—it's gorgeous. Hand-crafted from paper and photographed, this truly is an example of our team's excellent abilities and potential. Well done, Emily McLain.

Liz Coffee's talents are exceptional, and she's an all around all star at any creative endeavor that comes her way. Given the minimal assets for this campaign, the creative juices are just overflowing here: 

How do you combine the drama of a medieval cable series and the lush expanses of a grape vineyard's bounty? Here's one way:

Loren Stump's overall design style is so fresh and so clean. It's no wonder his work for Freska Produce shines, glistens, and glows.

We think this layout is one of our best pieces of 2019. By using a clean and rich menagerie of Serif Fonts with the personable photographs of Chef Ryan, a fun and elegant layout came to fruition.

This layout by the bold Bianca Medina used such a unique mixture of shape, color, and photography that collectively makes the design very cohesive. With shapes acting as shadows, the photo shapes echo the halftone images and line design while the organic shapes from the leaves create successful contrast.

Technically speaking, this layout is from December of 2018, but since the design is so simple and effective, we had to shout it out as a best layout.

This layout is celery cranked-up to it's highest potential, or 11, if you will. You simply can't touch it.

Here's another one by Loren Stump, again leading the pack with his knack of combining homemade illustrations and a stellar design acumen. What makes this piece shine is the vivid red-orange color palette and the illustrative texture that really pulls the layout together. It is not only seasonally appropriate, but beautiful too.

Here's another striking Snapshot, created by Jose Nieto. Fabulous.

Combining strong photography and a thoughtful, clean design, it made the cut no questions asked.

This magical layout utilizes illustration to cleverly combine citrus with a Halloween theme for the October issue. Stunning.

Our final layout showcases great photography combined with a bold use of type, looking on-trend. Amazing work by Deanna Tran.

One of our best covers and layouts this year featured DMA Solutions. The photography was exceptional for this story and the cover really captures the strength and warmth of the DMA team. 

Knocking another portfolio piece out of the box, Loren Stump fails to disappoint once again. We never know where he's going to take us, but once we see what he's come up with, we're rarely not impressed. All hand-illustrated:

What can be said of a cover, which blew us all away? This cover, another high-end paper craft project by Emily McLain, really shows us all that she is not joking around. Serious design and photography kudos for this one:

Once in a while, we get to take some photos and luckily for us, we have some multi-talented staff on hand to step up to the tripod. Here is a selection of some of our best photos from the past year.

We're not just designers, we're artists and illustrators as well! Here's a selection of our best from 2019.

The following animation done by Emily McLain speaks for itself. Not only was the project completed within a short window of time, the amount of work that went into it was painstaking and thorough. Taking time and care, Emily crafts each of her animations with cleverness and respect for the medium that is unsurpassed in our company. In this project, Giumarra Companies asked us to create a video for their annual shuttle bus campaign. We were so excited for the opportunity that our ambition soared thinking of all the possible ways we could go about it. Emily, needless to say, grabbed the wheel and steered us beyond our expectations. Enjoy her creation yourself:

Next up is a “trailer” created by Loren Stump. Loren really took this and went with it. The sequences are pretty unique given the simple concept and was executed very well. We were all certainly surprised and amused by the creativity, and the animations remain memorable to this day:

The following video certainly has a lot of Pazazz. With the final sequences composed with ample precision, Bianca Medina, who joined us full time mid-year of 2019, crafted this animation for our client, which kind of blew the doors off what we were expecting. Although the assets were mostly supplied, the overall finished product is staggeringly impressive:

Finally, this work by another relatively new employee, Jose Nieto, definitely needs some acknowledgement. Given his experience with After Effects, he really impressed us by how quickly he got up to speed with our other seasoned employees. The final video contains a lot of playful elements, smooth transitions, and overall a very solid execution.

If you're curious as to what else we've created, here's a reel of all of the great animation that we featured on AndNowUKnow in 2019. Check it out:

It's not easy designing an attractive digital spot with a limited space to work with. However, our design team seems to always strike a balance between negative space and getting the message across. See it to believe it:

Want to see more? Open up any of our issues and you will see a plethora of thoughtfully composed work from some of the produce industry's most talented designers. And although we've only featured what we've done here, there are many other designers within the industry who also shine. Take a moment next time you're reading one to appreciate the hard work that goes into making The Snack a beautiful publication all around. Thank you to the designers, authors, and photographers on our team, we're grateful for having you on our side, we couldn't do it without you.