For Love

Hue Shift
Pop-Up Shop

Branding, Art Direction, Experiential

Hue Shift was a one-time pop-up pop that I ran over two days in the summer of 2018.

I liked the idea of creating a store specifically to showcase Toronto creative talent - all the vendors I included were based in Toronto, and supplied a variety of merchandise from prints to pins to pillows.

The store was set up in gallery Black Cat Artspace on Dundas West over the course of two nights. I did the visual merchanising and worked out how customers could interact with all the products, including holding items up to examine them, and try clothes on. The flow of the store was important to determine, as well as needs customers would have (a mirror for clothes, what kind of cash desk I needed).

I created a series of social posts to promote the store in advance, highlighting the work of all the vendors and making it colourful and appealing. The target audience of the store was other creatives, so to get their attention I just highlighted the quality of craft and Toronto origin, so other artists felt like this was a place for them.

I completed this project by myself, and it lived under the Toronto Design Directory umbrella.

Naming & Tone

When deciding on a name for the store, I considered the values and interests of my target audience, other designers and artists. I wanted something that they'd understand and relate to, and that described in broad terms what the store would sell.

After some brainstorming, I landed on Hue Shift. I liked it because it sounds like a technical colour term, but it isn't one you find in graphic design or illustration (it is a knitting term, though I didn't know that when I came up with it), so it sounds like something a designer would know but has a little mystery to it, which is enticing. The "shift" part specifically makes the store sound like it's something different, like this is a shift in the way things are usually done.

Paired with the art direction for the marketing I thought this would be an good direction for the store and make it appealing to creative types.

I set up the shop, stocked all the items, and worked out the visual merchandising. I created a bunch of different levels for products to sit at, so each product could be fully seen and catch a shopper's eye.

Promotion & Art Direction

The shop carried a lot of very differnt work from a number of different artists, and I wanted a way to showcase all these styles and items without them clashing.

Given the focus on colour in the name of the shop and the ideas behind that, I decided to focus on colour groups for photography. I group items by similar colour with a similar background, and in a few cases contrasted or complimented the primary item colours with the background for more interesting images.

All the art direction and photos were done by myself.