EGD: Paradise Beauty Lounge Nail Salon

Last year, Lash Paradise Beauty Lounge began transitioning to a more concise name, Paradise Beauty Lounge, in anticipation of the grand opening for the lash salon side that opened in 2020 and the nail salon which opened in 2022. While the name isn’t finalized due to some further research and needing to be done to make it happen, the name is appearing in different places online and in print.

Recently, Torianna Paradise, the owner/operator of Lash Paradise/Paradise Beauty Lounge, approached me and asked me to revise the signage we did for them to reflect the expansion of the lash salon to include the nail salon.

Below are the install photos from what we did. The nail salon windows had the same treatment as the lash salon side, right next door, and the listing of the main services were included in the building and pylon signs.

If you’re looking to make an appointment to get your lashes, nails, or brows done, visit their website to book an appointment!

EGD: Lash Paradise Beauty Lounge

Although I don’t wildly spend money on things I can’t afford, I’d like to say I have expensive taste. I enjoy looking at clothes, buying prestige brands when I shop for makeup, and not settling for store brand things when I know I can get the national brand names. I’m not great at saving (though I try), and I dunno… I wanna be fancy, I guess.

My boyfriend’s soon-to-be daughter-in-law, Torianna, has her cosmetology license and has been working doing hair (blowouts, specifically) and lashes for years at this point. She started her own LLC doing lashes and cleverly named it after herself: Lash Paradise. (Torianna’s last name is Paradise—cool, right?) She started by working out of her home in a cute little room in the house she and her two children shared with her mother and stepfather. There were cute and bougie lash-themed decorations, a nice bed lined with that crinkly paper you find in the doctor’s office on a roll, a small rolly-stool for the tech to sit while she’s working, and a nice little organizer on the side with all of her tools and supplies.

Over the years, she’s built up her clientele, and as a fellow woman with expensive taste, she also had dreams of having a high-end salon.

During the pandemic, she came to my boyfriend and me and announced she found a space and was going to rent it for her own salon. She wanted me to design the logo and signage and my boyfriend would take care of getting the collateral fabricated and he would install.

I was trying to wait until the salon’s grand opening before posting this blog, but the grand opening was also supposed to be a couple of months ago. The salon is open and operating and books fast! Contact and location info will be at the bottom of this post.

Lash Paradise Beauty Lounge, located at 127 Greentree Rd Ste 3, Blackwood, NJ 08012, is not too far from the on-ramp to 42 N (North-South Freeway) with easy access to Deptford shopping areas, 295 N and S, and the Walt Whitman and Ben Franklin bridges to Philadelphia. It’s also close to the AC Expressway, linking Philadelphia to Atlantic City, and Rt 322 for a more scenic route to the southern shore points.

You can call the salon at (856) 535-8569 or visit their website at https://lashparadisebeautylounge.com/home to book an appointment.

Throwback Thursday: EGD Workshop @ Penn Museum

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Who remembers how University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology didn’t have a cohesive signage/wayfinding system? Anyone? Just me?

It’s funny how things come full circle. When I was a junior at UArts, we were split into groups for a mandatory week-long workshop with an industry professional who volunteered to come in and show us what they do. I was in the group that worked under Virginia Gehshan of Cloud Gehshan, an EGD design firm seated right in Old City, Philadelphia.

At the time of this workshop (2010?), conception and possibly even design finalization was going on at Cloud Gehshan for new wayfinding going up at UPenn’s famed museum. Since that was the hot topic at the firm, Virginia thought that’s what we could do, also. So, she scheduled for us to take a field trip to the museum (sort of, we had to all pile in cabs or ride the subway to get to our destination—all of which we had to figure out on our own) and reconvened in the courtyard before splitting up once more. Our group opted (by majority consensus…or maybe Virginia voted for it) for cab ($8 one way per person, about 21 blocks), although I very much voted for subway (roughly $2 for one way, I think, at the time). I thought the subway would be quicker (and cheaper), we’d just have to buy tokens.

I remember my group: Marty, Leandra, John (who literally showed up once) and I think Sophie. Marty was our group leader and instructed us to take as many photos as possible. We went around and took photographs of signage (shown above, pin letters on the brick wall of the museum’s perimeter) of all types whether or not it belonged to the museum (yup, SEPTA bus route signs, too), decorations, wall patterns, murals, vinyls, floor tiles, etc. You name it, we photographed it. The idea was to get as many different ideas of any motifs or schemes we could find. The problem was, there was no correlation between the exterior and interior wayfinding and signage.

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When we were done, we headed back to our studio in Terra, the building we called home as GD students, and had a group discussion about what we saw at the museum as well as what our task would be for the rest of the week. We worked for a few hours before Virginia called time and we disbanded for the day.

The next day, we congregated into the studio, segregated in our assigned groups, and worked quietly. John, the member of our group who didn’t attend the first day of the workshop, showed up so I began going over with him what we were doing to get him up to speed.

Virginia thought I was being disruptive, so she looked over and told me to stop talking, that it’s not a social hour. I looked at her, slightly embarrassed as everyone stared at me, and said, “Virginia, this is John.” She goes, “Who is John? I don’t know who he is.” She’s clearly still annoyed. I responded with, “He’s in our group and was absent yesterday. I’m catching him up.” She felt bad, I could tell, and said, “Oh, okay.” She later apologized for calling me out when I wasn’t really doing anything wrong. I told her it was fine, and we moved on.

Despite that hiccup in our work time, our group spent the day sketching and discussing colors (sheet shown below provided by Virginia!), common shapes, potential schemes and how we were going to use everything.

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After that day, John never came back. We knew this would happen, so when we divvied up the work, we gave him something non-critical, despite his promise to show up daily. We pushed through without him over the next three days, and our visions came to life.

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By the end of the week, we had a full package ready to present. As instructed, we pinned up our process book showcasing our thought process throughout this workshop alongside the other groups.

It was interesting to see what everyone did, especially when color palettes and other ideas were similar but used and executed very differently.

Each group got to present their signage and wayfinding package, and at the end, we all clapped and celebrated with pizza. It was the last time I saw Virginia, but not the last time I worked with Cloud Gehshan.

Three years later, I was hired by Urban Sign and worked there for five years. One of the first projects I got to see go out the door was none other than the signage designed by Cloud Gehshan for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

So really, my experience with EGD begins when I was still in college. I never thought that’s where I’d end up, but alas, I spent the last six years immersed in signage, murals, wayfinding, ADA, interactive displays, etc. It’s an incredible field, and I’ve learned so much being in it.

Below are some of the things we finalized as part of our wayfinding package for the museum:

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Top Hops Essex Crossing

Concept rendering I did in Photoshop.

I like beer. Not like, to the level of Supreme Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but enough to be excited about a job that involves beer. No, I didn’t get to drink any, but I got to look at it and think like it.

What does that even mean?

Well, it means think like your client. Not in the sense of not knowing how to arrange type and making things pop to the point it looks like you made it in MS Paint, but rather about the business. What about them? What do they do? Why do people love them? What do they look like? What do they want to look like? Ask questions because with questions come answers and with answers come ideas.

Creativity wasn’t at full blast here as some of the implementations were taken from their other locations—to sort of, y’know, tie it all together. Color palettes, sign styles, etc.

via @Top_Hops on Instagram

What makes things fun, though, is being able to pull other people into the mix. In this project, we needed (2) hanging bottle signs, (2) chalkboards, one counter stencil and a whole lot of Photoshop work. The bottle signs and counter stencil was easy—send it to the shop. But what do we do with the chalkboards? We could ask the shop to make them, OR…

We can employ a woodworker who makes out-of-this-world things like furniture and décor from scrap wood he sources from various places. I had brought Jeff Miller, a former classmate of mine from our undergrad days and a fellow South Jerseyan, on board for a project we did for Adidas in their new office space in NYC—he built four styles of frames for us for that job, about twenty or so in total (it may have been more), and they were phenomenal. I knew he’d blow this one out of the park, too. I convinced my boss to let him do it and yup!

He did it again.

All-in-all, this job was a success and the clients were really happy with the outcome.

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Client: Top Hops Brewing Company (via drive21)

Project: Top Hops Essex Crossing Market

Fabricators: XDFOUR; Jeff Miller

Undertone @ 1 WTC

Quote with mustache layout for the Dalí room.

What do Georgia O’Keeffe, Banksy and Dalí have in common? Other than being artists, nothing. They’re all from different time periods and have vastly different styles of creating art. However, the folks at Undertone loved that about these artists and wanted to bring their flavor together in this new soup called “our new office”.

The information I got was simple: a floor plan with room labels, quotes that were to be used and the artists’ names, and ideas of what imagery was desired. Basic, but helpful. The rest was up to my team and me…my team being just the team lead and me in the beginning, then the other two guys later on during install. Over our holiday break, my team lead and I sent files back and forth—I did the research and laid everything out, he was the second set of eyes that looked over everything. Between the two of us, all of the window vinyl (less than 100 panels) was in production in two days with client approval.

Quote layout designed by me; a stencil was applied to the wall to ensure straight lines and proper alignment

As the month went by, more research, back and forth (at a minimum) and product sourcing went by. Where does one find a real bull’s skull? eBay, of course! And how about the gradient wallpaper behind it? Make the gradient, we’ll print it in our shop!

If there’s one thing I learned from this job, it’s that Annie Leibovitz does not mass print any of her photographs. How bougie.

Where do the picture frames come from that go around the images you can get? The shop! Nope, shop won’t make them in the short amount of time you have, so then what? Buy them! From an online frame store! Luckily a coworker had just bought from said e-store for another job and was happy with the outcome.

How about that pantry wall? Design the type for the quote and make a stencil!

What about the wall decals? eBay! No! MAKE THEM IN THE SHOP—production costs are lower than sourcing and purchasing each one. And that mirrored bear as homage to Jeff Koons? Make it; just needs a little DS VHB on the back, maybe some silicone.

This is probably one of the more fun jobs I got put on and the view from Undertone’s office on the 77th floor is amazing. Wouldn’t mind doing something like this again.