When we opened this month’s HOW magazine, we were so excited to see an awesome feature of the brand development we did for DIRT, a health-food made fast restaurant in Miami Beach.


We are so proud of this project and it made us smile to see “Outstanding Achievement” recognition in one of our favorite design mags! We want to make sure you can read the feature so we typed it out nice + neat for you.

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eat DIRT

The helium creative team was handed a tall order back in 2014: “We were approached by the founders of [a] restaurant concept to create a brand that would have a bold presence within a saturated marketplace of organic, locally grown foods in South Beach, [FL], “says art director Ryan Sirois. helium tackled everything from the naming process to the brand experience and identity, and DIRT officially launched in December of 2015. “We knew the concept would eventually grow to multiple locations, so we made sure to achieve a look and feel with broad appeal,” Sirois adds.
helium aimed to ahieve a clean, modern aesthetic that allows the ingredients and food to be showcased, keeping in line with DIRT’s mission for quality ingredients, love for great food and transparency. “We kept the overall brand black and white, stripped down and linear so the vibrant colors and textures of their food and juices became a prime communicator in their experience,” Sirois says.




The client was on board with both the name and the identity almost from the start. “Of course there is always concern or pushback when you present a name like DIRT for a restaurant,” Sirois says. “But it works.”

Sirois says the studio is most proud of the response DIRT has received from customers. The founder of DIRT says they approached their Year 1 sales projections within the first six months, and he attributes that largely to the brand.


“The brand police did a great job here,” says judge Scott Maney. “It’s not easy designing something this elegant, this smart, this fun, this cool and [being] this consistent. Somewhere along the line it inevitable drops a turd. DIRT is clean. I love everything about it.”

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Thanks so much for the feature HOW Magazine!!
For more design, brand development and inspiration follow @heliumcreative on Instagram!

Global landscape architecture firm, EDSA, and helium creative joined forces initially for a year-long campaign in 2011. The relationship has grown since then and we have continued to work on many large-scale projects together.

We wrapped up the fourth edition of Design Matters Magazine for EDSA in June, the culmination of many months of collaboration with the EDSA marketing team. The goal of the magazine is to showcase EDSA as not only a leader in their industry, but also a resource for trends, insight and inspiration. Strategically used as a direct mail piece to all clients, vendors and associates, the Design Matters magazine is also used as a marketing tool during conferences, meetings and events.




We know what you’re asking – how do we get this massive magazine project completed? We meet with the EDSA marketing team to review all articles. Each article relates to a topic or theme surrounding EDSA as a company or the industry as a whole, circling around landscape architecture, urban design, sustainability and trends in hospitality. After scouring each one for inspiration, ideas and content, helium gives a giant Santa wish list of additional visual concepts and assets to help us bring the magazine to life.

Once we are provided with the requested images and text, the helium team sketches page layouts based on our proposed article concepts.


EDSA’s marketing team reviews the concepts, provides feedback and revisions are made until designs are perfected. After months of planning and weeks of design + edits, Design Matters is truly a labor of love for both EDSA and helium creative. With our fourth collaborative installment of the magazine now closed, we look forward to the next edition always excited to see what new challenges will help breathe life into this annual project.

For more design, brand development + inspiration follow @heliumcreative on Instagram, Facebook + Twitter.

We recently shared about the process of creating the brand for Backpacks.com.


It is absolutely no secret that we fell in love with this project from the get-go. Now that the site is live and ready for your shopping pleasure [seriously, get out your credit card – so worth it], we are doing a little Part Deux and walking through the design process of the Backpacks.com website. We set out to create an online experience for a company with plans to dominate the backpack category space. Oh, and they are doing just that.

When shopping for a bag, the primary motivator is an actual functional need. Whether it’s a way to carry a laptop, school supplies or hiking gear – our approach to categorize the backpacks by lifestyle set the tone for a focused + seamless online shopping experience. Active, Outdoor, Fashion, Everyday, Business, and Student categories became opportunities to offer color identifiers to the brand experience. An easy way for the shopper to immediately identify what they’re looking for.



Colors were selected based on their category relation. Business, for example, is a rich blue to convey trust and professionalism. Active is red, vibrant, and heated. Outdoor is a deep forest green. The color tonality remains rich to compliment a sophisticated brand while communicating an exciting journey.


Our primary objective was to set the bar for online backpack retailers, ensuring backpacks.com owns the space. Custom lifestyle photography is woven throughout to support the brand story, look and feel. Product imagery is unobtrusively dispersed to promote sales without overwhelming the customer. We subtly showcase featured backpack brands through photography, hover options, and specific brand pages as well.


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The Life Journey concept is the foundation of the Backpacks.com brand. A video produced by our partners, The Guild 5 Forty Five, opens the website communicating the story of the unique lifestyle of different life travelers – hikers, businessmen, parents, children, teenagers, skateboarders, surfers. In the end, they are a large market sect with one common thread – they each have the perfect backpack for their lifestyle.

We are thrilled to introduce you to the e-commerce website of Backpacks.com!

 For more website design, brand development + inspiration follow @heliumcreative.com.