The Flash Nites | Illuminate History
Fine Art Night Photography, Light-Painting, & Historical Storytelling
About The Flash Nites
“We create the color onsite, painting it by hand, so to speak. With the full moon at our side, we pop strobes and wield flashlights like paintbrushes across the interiors of these structures, capturing the vibrancy through long exposure photography.”
Website: The Flash Nites
My Objective
As the brand developer, co-copywriter, and marketing/digital designer…and business co-pilot:
Update the brand and company name that has served us well, but doesn’t speak to our current creative direction.
Process At-A-Glance
- Update the logo
- Develop assets and other materials to support the analog world of art fairs and the digital world of social media and email
- Re-platform, design, and launch a new CMS website experience. In other words, pivot from the old Squarespace to WordPress
The Trigger
Why change the name from Fading Nostalgia to The Flash Nites?
Since its launch in 2011, Fading Nostalgia has been many things for me and my business partner, Chris Robleski. It primarily serves as a place to share photos and stories about the nostalgic America in which our parents and grandparents were raised. It inspires us to create, to write, to capture, and to enlighten others about a world that is fading fast. Our digital space has clocked nearly 100,000 pageviews, from the US to Japan to Luxembourg; while our analog U.S. Tour Bus has traveled from North Dakota to Ohio to Texas, and clocked nearly 200,000 miles in between.
While our night photography was always part of the Fading Nostalgia initiative, for the first few years we focused on the creation, publication, and promotion of our book, Polaroid Photos from Route 66. As the book’s fervor came to a natural end, the night photography became our true focus. So we decided to move beyond the nostalgic look-and-feel. We simply needed an updated brand and digital space to reflect that maturity we had reached, yes as photographers, but also as storytellers of history. A more modern brand approach would help our photography and stories take center stage. So we changed our logo and our look, but kept the name “Fading Nostalgia”…until…
Recently, we felt another shift. While the current look-and-feel was pretty close to our overall direction, the name was all wrong. Fading Nostalgia was entrenched in greasy diner food, kitschy roadside brochures, and stacks of Polaroids…not necessarily our night photography, which had gained significant ground and won awards in the art festival world. A change of name might help clarify our primary focus. The challenge, however, was that we didn’t want to completely lose the retro flair and playfulness we’d generated over the past few years.
My Solution
If you’re unaware as to how we put colored light into these abandoned buildings, I’ll let you in on a not-so-secret trade secret: flashlights. [By all means, read more about the process here.] So while we already featured a flashlight in our logo and our tagline–Illuminate History–obviously we needed to take it a step further and really hit people over the head with our tool. Ahem.
Enter: The Flash Nites. The same F.N. you know and love.
The reboot rises out of the same nostalgic stuff, this time with a melody: soul singers, jazz musicians, and doo-wop groups, glowing jukeboxes and dusty record jackets, moonlit drives from the urban jungle into the quiet countryside, with each town’s radio station leading the way. Plus it’s a hell of a lot easier to spell.
The Flash Nites Business Card – Front
Let's literally show all of our flashlights. It's ingenious.
The Flash Nites Business Card – Back
And use the current photo which gets the most play so people remember us.
The Flash Nites Responsive Website
We migrated from Squarespace to Wordpress, which makes content management a breeze.
The Flash Nites Signage
Signage we use at art fest events to explain how we create our photography. The bigger the explanation, the better.
Brand Design Details
From a design standpoint, in order to maintain just a little bit of our retro roots, I kept the globular heart shape we’ve had since our inception in 2011: an icon that harkens back to old motel signs and Formica countertops. I nixed the heart’s wood backdrop and light blue and swapped it for a smattering of stars against a midnight blue. And I selected the font Cartel Deux because of its ’50s flair.
Website Replatforming
Switching from Squarespace to WordPress was no easy feat. While Squarespace does allow you to export the bulk of your website to an .xml file for an easy-breezy WordPress import, you do lose a lot of formatting and have to install a WP plug-in to import the bulk of your images. And a complete migration is not guaranteed. There are a bunch of Squarespace page-types that won’t migrate at all. So while this wasn’t completely a start-from-scratch endeavor, I definitely had to retouch every single page, gallery, and blog-post we’d ever created within our site to ensure the entire architecture would exist in its new home.
Because of the domain change from fadingnostalgia.com to theflashnites.com, I also had to scrub the entire website’s content for links that would be broken. Sure I also set up over 100 301 redirects to handle various external bookmarks, links, and mentions of Fading Nostalgia, but it’s best to edit as many internal sources as possible.
Final Conclusion? Let’s never change our name again.
For nostalgia’s sake, a look back on the retro
First, the permutation of the logo since 2010 (when the idea of Fading Nostalgia was but a twinkle in our eyes):
Then, in 2013, when Chris and I took to the road with nothing but a press kit, a suitcase full of Polaroid books, and the American Dream, this version of the Fading Nostalgia logo and encompassing brand were absolutely perfect. It captured all of the nostalgic essence of America from our car windows as we meandering down Route 66, from Chicago to L.A.
Fading Nostalgia Polaroid Book advertising rack card
Take-away postcard for book signings, art fairs, and to place in the old racks you see when you stop for a bathroom break in the middle of nowhere, USA.
Fading Nostalgia Signage and Business Card Design
On display when we sold Polaroid-related items in art festivals and book signings
More Polaroid Book advertising design
The map shows all of the shops along Route 66 (and Cleveland!) who agreed to sell our book after we literally knocked on their doors to ask.
Buttons!
You can't have a business surrounding travel and NOT have rad pinback buttons.
Happy First Anniversary!
To celebrate our 1st anniversary in 2012, I created a set of banners for our website and social media sites.
Fading Nostalgia Polaroid Event Banner
Another banner displayed at various events at which we sold our Polaroid Book
And finally, in 2014, we switched our visual brand from the old-school to a little more modernized in order to dial back the retro roadside look and focus more attention on our night photography and light-painting endeavors. This definitely paved the way for our current look and company name-change.
Fading Nostalgia Logo and Business Card
Let's use the photo where we literally drew a door with a flashlight. It's ingenious.
Fading Nostalgia Responsive Website
We migrated from Wordpress to Squarespace, which has made frequent show and product updates a breeze.
Fading Nostalgia Signage
Signage we use at art fest events to explain how we create our photography.
Fading Nostalgia Signage
The bigger the explanation, the better.
What the future holds
To take the road less traveled is our motto at The Flash Nites, and that certainly goes for the proverbial road of opportunity. Who knows what lies ahead, but one thing’s for sure, we’re fueled up on gas and goldfish crackers and ready for the long haul.
more work. check it.
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