Sometimes you just have to go for it.

A few months ago one of our office neighbors, an architect firm, decided to move out for greener pastures. Now, we’d been thinking about acquiring more office space—the work’s been growing and we’ve been hosting more meetings. So the vacancy came at the right time.

But truth be told, we weren’t thinking about tripling our square footage.

But sometimes you just have to go for it.

So we signed the lease. And Hello Viking will officially take over lots more space in early January, in our current 1005 West Franklin Ave location. Now it’ll be just us and the lawyers above the city’s best ice cream shop.

Here’s a few shots of the new space. The walls have been painted, but the floors still need work.

This will be the main creative space, along Hennepin Ave.

The hole in the wall connects the main creative space with production and reception, along Hennepin Ave.

Here’s the view out the Hennepin Ave windows. Hello, downtown Minneapolis!

And here’s the new main conference room. Guess it needs a conference table. And the light fixture needs to move to make room for the overhead projector.

Finally, we’ve also got some nifty interior space, with a little bit of furniture assembled.

One of our highlights in 2009 was the opportunity to collaborate with our friends at Taxi Branding, Persuasion Arts & Sciences and our mutual clients at Hayneedle to define, create and launch the positioning and advertising for the online specialty retailer. It was an intriguing challenge—to figure out a singular way to describe a brand which contains 250+ special stores. The statement we coined, “The home of more choices for your home” and the tagline: “Variety, sweet variety” have helped the brand remain remarkable in a tough economic climate. Here’s a sampling of the work the collective team created for Hayneedle in 2009. Read the rest of this entry »