San Francisco Design Week Open Studios - Thursday

Last week here in the Bay Area was San Francisco Design Week- hosted by AIGASF. On Tuesday and Thursday evening, many of the design studios in SF opened their spaces up to the public, and Jake, Monika, and I made a trip out to see as many of them as possible.

Thursday: CCS Architecture, Lunar Design, Frog Design, R/GA Media Group, Smart Design, Astro Studios

CCS Architecture was a brief stop, but the only Architecture Firm on the list for both days. What was most interesting about CCS was the space. There was almost none of it. San Francisco has very high rents, and I cannot imagine building some of these intricate models they had made without massive amounts of workspace, but here they are.

Lunar Design was a cool, relaxed workspace. The space was a great deal larger than CCS, and even as the employees were not currently, it still felt like things were getting done.



A favorite artifact was this tourney bracket for SF Design firm dodgeball. Look at all the big names that participated!



Frog Design had a neat set up, with videos being projected onto the windows of the offices. They had a live band and the usual food and drink- but boy were there hundreds of people there! The place was so packed that it was hard to get a look at anything they were showing!



R/GA Media Group focused on advertising and branding. They were behind such brands as the Barnes and Noble Nook, and various campaigns for Nike. None of us being branding designers, we found it neat, but we made our stay short.

We instead went next door for a quick stop in a fund raising soiree for some public bike company. I'm not sure what we were supposed to learn there, but we were definitely not supposed to be there, as one of the event organizers made it quite clear to us. I got three shrimp out of the deal, and Monika almost got some free socks, and we were on our way.

Smart Design had our favorite space of the night- a large open air studio with rows of desks. Here, the pictures tell a better story than I can. We did not win a raffle for a video camera or an "Objectified" DVD.



We thought we might be too late, but we headed to Astro Studios anyway, to see if they had kept their studio open late. They had, and to our surprise, they had turned their space into something of a night club, instead of any presentation regarding their company- although we may have just arrived too late for that part. None of us had come to schmooze, so we grabbed some more free drinks, played some foozeball in the dark, and went home.