Cover pillow with liner.
Cover liner with pillow case.
Rest your head.

Rest your head.

We’ve been delighted by the flurry of appreciation and exclamation points—and by people’s creative descriptions of the linings and the optimism they portend. Wishing you happy holidays and the very best for 2009.

This photo posted to Flickr by “! just your girl” shed light on the mailing label.

Wrapture!

Heads up—Scott concentrates on lining the boxes with tissue, to protect the pair of Silver Linings.

Tissue beaucoup—Nate refines his technique for sliding the slightly slinky linings into their boxes.

What is the collective noun for silver linings? A rainbow? An aspiration? A wish?

Just a quick note to wish you the best as the year (our 16th in business!) draws to a close. Our thanks to everyone who in 2008: provided the reference, signed the check, took the photo, styled the shot, found the location, edited the copy, drew the picture, illustrated the concept, wrote the code, visited the studio, determined the positioning, suggested the paper, printed the brochure, proofed the color, drank the margarita, AND fed the inspiration.

The year included new projects with old friends at Sundance, Gump’s, Naturopathica, New Leaf Paper, The Golden Bear, Hlaska, TravelSmith, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. And we met new friends through projects with the California Academy of Sciences, Golden Star Tea Company, Stand & Deliver, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, New York Life, and Sandia National Laboratories. Our collaborations with our clients, colleagues, and friends mean the world to us.

As we head into the new year—and into challenging economic times for everyone—please know that we remain at your service. Call us if you are looking for ways to do more with less—and still present your best self while keeping your spending in check.

Wishing you a prosperous and innovative New Year!

Elixir Design
2134 Van Ness Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94109
(415) 834-0300

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We’re excited to start the new year with a profile in the Jan./Feb. issue of Communication Arts. You’ll also find us online: on our blog (subscribe via RSS or email for client news and updates); on Facebook (become a fan); or at LinkedIn, where you can “link in” with each of us individually. Resolve to connect; we’d love to see what you are up to.

Read the San Francisco Chronicle piece.

Renovations to our third-floor annex are complete, expanding the Elixir offices by 700 square feet and four workstations while providing access to an outdoor deck space (that, given the season, we are yet to fully utilize). Wish list items for the new deck include pink flamingo, jacuzzi, six Adirondack chairs, sunshine, outdoor shower, and/or potted plants.

Every November, the Elixir team gathers to assemble and mail a holiday gift to friends and family. This year we met around the fire at the Pelican Inn in Muir Beach. (For you non-locals, yes, this is what the holiday season looks like in Northern California.) We rented out the main dining area, with plenty of room to spread out our assembly line. We hope you enjoyed the warmth, freedom and flexibility of the fingerless gloves. We found ours wonderfully convenient at the keyboard on frosty mornings, tying shoelaces at the Muni stop, chopping garlic, and eating roasted organic peanuts in the shell.

Elixir’s model sashayed down the runway in a flowing gown made entirely of coffee filters, with a cloud of white smoke streaming out of her bustle, for Afterlife: Paper, Purgatory and the Great Beyond, a recent AIGA competition whose theme was to create a dress made of used paper.

For the Elixir gown, we created an elegant gradient of earthy brown tones by using a mixture of variously stained used coffee filters. Holding dry ice inside the dress proved to be most difficult. To activate dry ice (and get that streaming white smoke effect) water must first be boiled. The challenge was to find a way to construct a secure enough vessel to hold dry ice without harming our model. Our solution? We water-proofed the bustle and used a water bottle belt with a series of small bottles around the waist to hold the ice.

The Rolodex, an essential tool slowly fading away as people adopt electronic alternatives, remains a solid fixture in the Elixir office.We’ve had a warm and loving relationship with ours since the firm was founded in 1992. While we found evidence to suggest that sketches were drawn proposing a large rotary file bookkeeping system in the early-18th century (see: Mechanization Takes Command, 1948), the first actual Rolodex didn’t appear on the shelves until 1958. And, boy, are we glad it did. Thank you, Arnold Neustradter.

After nine years of paper letters, Elixir goes gold. And 3D. Witness Senior Designer, Nate Durrant, letterspace for Van Ness legibility.

Elixir treated itself to a new set of conference room chairs this fall.