Brendan Callahan

Friends don't let friends book irresponsibly. Do your part. We teamed up with Chef Michael Voltaggio to educate diners on the impact of not showing up for a reservation. 

Keep an eye out for more from our protagonists Bob & Mimi. 

Creative Director: Brendan Callahan
Writer: Simon Goetz
Video and Production: Sharkpig

After nearly one year in the Australian market, OpenTable launched their first brand campaign in Sydney and Melbourne. Aussies are tech forward but still prefer to use the phone to make restaurant reservations. The objective of the campaign is to build brand awareness and kickstart the Australian market to make OpenTable the destination for booking online, 24/7. 

Securing the right restaurant table is of utmost importance to ensure a great night out. The campaign is comprised of 5 unique situations: A dog grooming table, surfboard workshop, massage table, library and a morgue, humorously showcasing what can happen if you leave securing a restaurant table to chance. The creative is aimed at encouraging Australian diners to ‘next time, get the right table’. These ads are running in OOH billboards, bus/subway posters, social media and wrapped city buses all over Sydney and Melbourne through the end of the year.

CMO: Scott Jampol
Creative Director: Brendan Callahan
Senior Director, Brand: Cort Cunningham
Senior Copywriter: Simon Goetz
Senior Art Director: Alex Styc
Creative Producer: Adam Bordow
Illustrator: Tim Tomkinson

Thinking back on the mentors that have helped shaped my career, I am forever grateful for their time and encouragement. Welcoming insight and perspective is healthy to any person or company growth. At OpenTable, we welcomed four new board members to our table. I worked with San Francisco-based wood worker Ben Laramie and Town Cutler on the presentation of our gift set.

Connected, a journal from OpenTable, shares visual and written stories that go beyond the restaurant table. By chronicling a city through the people who bring food to our table and their connections to one another in places near and far, we can all gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of that which we eat and take part in a more sustainable future.

For issue 1, a 100+ page printed book was produced that profiled the purveyors, chefs, and farmers that support the operation of two plant-forward restaurants, Grain Store in London and Hundred Acres in New York. Non-native photographer's Daniel Shea and Emma Hardy, traveled alongside local writers Ian Frisch and Tom Morris, to capture the subjects stories, and draw parallels between the two city's dining scenes.

Read full issue

Creative Director: Brendan Callahan
Editor-in-Chief: Cort Cunningham
Senior Designer: Erich Grois
Photography Producer & Editor: Adam Bordow
Editor: Lily Betjeman

Creative Director of Airbnb's first publication, Pineapple Magazine. Together with Christopher Lukezic, Alex Tieghi–Walker, Carrie Levy, David Nguyen, our team launched issue one in November 2014 and
nominated as an SPD50 finalist for entire magazine design.

Pineapple is a tangible expression of the Airbnb brand and a vivid reimagining of the travel magazine, not told through the eyes of distant editors, but through people who have fostered community and created wonder in a city. It gathers stories from locals: people who are already under the skin of a city, and visitors experiencing the city first-hand with hosts.

A branding system for the Airbnb franchise, Night At, that transforms iconic spaces into homes just for one night.

From Fenway Park to the recording studio of Korean pop-star GDragon, this global design toolkit and branding system is strong enough to support any location, even a moonshot.

I worked with Samya Deb in our Singapore office on explorations as well as Regional Marketing directors from EMEA and APAC to ensure the logo would translate.

Last year, 245K Airbnb guests visited Berlin. This Berlin Economic Impact Study storyline shares why they came and how they made a difference. 

In collaboration with Alex Anderson and Leejay Abucayan
Illustration by Ella Cohen

A visualization of Brian Chesky's Manifesto, written on Medium December 2013.

Art Director: Brendan Callahan
Designer: David Nguyen
Illustration: Agnes Lee
Photo editor: Adam Burdow

Print guides that explore the best of cities and neighborhoods through the local lens of Airbnb’s host community. The collection includes Brooklyn, Chicago, Omaha, San Francisco and will continue to grow.

The best part of this series is working with the host community and local illustrators like Eric Nyffeler, Mikey Burton, Agnes Lee and Josh Cochran.

Art director for over 50 issues of Dwell Magazine from 2005-2011. In 2008, I collaboratively led the redesign of the magazine with Kyle Blue, Geoff Halber, Sam Grawe and Suzanne Lagasa. 

Our redesign included revamping the cover, the grid and typographic palette, and visualizing new editorial sections of the magazine with inspired art direction and information graphics.

Semigood Design is an American furniture company focused on the development and execution of timeless and expertly crafted heirloom products. 

As co-founder and creative director, I was responsible for the brand. From the art direction, design, and production of all advertising, marketing, sales collateral and packaging.

The design challenge for the branding was that it had to work on several surfaces. From traditional printing, to a burn on each piece of furniture, to a stencil for our shipping crates.

We're a no-ego brand. For our naming, rather than a description of our product, Semigood is an indication of our priorities. We take craftsmanship seriously, not ourselves.

Video by DaftKraft

Design lead for consumer and enterprise digital interactive books; across medical, trade, employee training and reference categories. Worked collaboratively with front-end developers on a responsive, modular and scalable pattern library which allowed publishing partners and internal teams to beautifully design digital books at scale.

The launch of Modernist Cuisine was a big ticket book for Inkling as they moved into trade and culinary e-books.

As part of the consumer title launch, I worked with our marketing team on top-of-funnel marketing strategies; a video, photoshoot, landing page and digital campaign. I led a photoshoot at the test kitchen of Modernist Cuisine in Seattle and used all photography the campaign deliverables. My team curated all the MCAH content, created animatics for use in the launch video, which we made in collaboration with Agency Collective.

As Inkling began to bring awareness to their young brand, a creative opportunity presented itself to educate users on the variety of content and depth of learning available within the Inkling digital library. The concept is based on the myriad of influences between art and history, poetry and music, science and investment and how these overlaps demonstrate interdisciplinary understanding of a subject.

The compositions were used within digital marketing, P1 and P2 on Inkling.com and user onboarding flows. 

Brand Illustrations by Tim Tomkinson

Being truly a collaboration with so many talented and smart people, this project included design and strategy for the Inkling Habitat launch event at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. 

Habitat, a cloud-based publishing platform, is a tool that helps teams create scalable, interactive content. The event took place in two connecting rooms; the welcoming room was dedicated to the history of publishing and the presentation room was the unveiling of the technology to bring publishers to the next chapter of their industry.

The welcoming room was darkly-lit and had eight presentation cases, each containing a selection of pivotal books in history, carefully curated by Bauman Rare Books. Guests wore name tags designed to emulate library cards and floral arrangements were set in card catalog drawers. 

The presentation room was well-lit against the back drop of Central Park. A printing press, acting as a link between the two rooms, was the only decoration on the stage for Inkling CEO, Matt McInnis' presentation of Habitat. 

Design team: Dave Muro, Masa Hoshino, Liz Gershman, Darren Wong, Stephanie Jansen, Kien Nguyen, Antonia Hidalgo

Habitat video by Jon Shenk, Actual Films

Inkling Habitat is a cloud-based collaborative publishing environment for creating and distributing responsive digital content. As the product design team was working on Habitat, they reached out to my team to help bring a design language to the forefront that was consistent with the digital content in our books. Part of this effort was creating  a suite of icons that gave a face to the HTML patterns a user could drag and drop. As art director, my role was to help guide the work of my designers, set up a schedule to ensure timely rounds of creative review
and work with the product team to work through blockers and ensure the development outcome was on brand.

Art Director: Brendan Callahan
Designer: Antonia Hidalgo
Product design lead: Chanpory Rith

I was honored to do a number of illustrations for the highly anticipated book from Geoff Manaugh, The BLDGBLOG Book, published by Chronicle Books. 

Book design by MacFadden & Thorpe