Ono Poke
Every independent practice has a design graveyard. Not because the ideas weren't any good, but because timelines, budgets, or circumstance got in the way. Ono Poke is one of mine.
When I worked with the crew at Ono Poke back in 2018, my role wasn't to redesign their identity. It was to build a merch line around it. I wondered what would happen if Alberta and Hawaii collided head-on.
That gave us The Edmonton Surf Club. A surfer gripping a hockey stick. A pineapple with a prairie twist. Enamel pins that cut straight through the province. The merch leaned into eating fresh Pacific fish next to a snowbank on 104th Street, and it was all the better for it.
The pieces I still think about, though, are the ones that never made it. One poster celebrated a legendary Edmonton surf break that never broke. The other simply shouted "HOWDY" over a postcard-perfect beach. They pushed the idea further than anything else in the project, but they stayed in the deck.
Ono Poke has been gone for a few years now, another casualty of the pandemic-era downtown landscape. It seemed like as good a time as any to dust these off. Maybe have a bowl for the ones that got away and the beautiful absurdity of the prairies.