noises from dog n’ moon.

This is our most recent work for Azusa Pacific University’s School of Music. We started building this thing last year while it was still in production and it’s great to see it finally head off to duplication. We tried to keep with this larger, grander, more celestial mood for the artwork. We didn’t want to do anything that was too tongue-in-cheek or playful because we wanted to avoid anything that would detract from the reverence. And that was certainly self-imposed, the fine folks at APU have always been really receptive to our more “outside” ideas. The final design:

Here are the two alternate designs we submitted.
While both offered a unique take on the idea of Music of Heaven, I feel great about the one they chose. The second idea listed Biblical text that included the word “music”, but it felt like it would make a better poster design. The very nature of compact discs is that you’re wanting the cover to draw the user in, to make him or her want to open the case and experience the revelation of sight and sound. The “Biblical Text” idea didn’t offer enough intrigue, in my opinion.  

The third idea had all the grandeur that we were aiming for, but the subtle cross was a little too subtle. And any attempts to make it less subtle immediately made it too gratuitous. You know, “there’s a fine line between genius and stupid”, as Nigel Tuffnel would say. In this case we felt like subtlety was the better choice, but to some, it would just look like we dumped the title over some stock photography to increase the comp count. 

The final idea never actually made it to submission. Since we decided that this needed to be something less tongue-in-cheek, we opted not to include it in the comp delivery. I don’t personally feel like it’s too playful, but there’s an edginess and a confident swagger that goes along with using vintage and vibey designs for a product. I felt like the confident swagger ran counter to the mood and message of the music, so we never pitched it. I gotta tell you, though, I love this design, and feel like it’s gonna see the light of day elsewhere, as long as it fits the mood, message, and target audience of the product. If we intended to use it just because it’s hip, it would be at the top of this post.
 

I have this friend who is steeped in the world of interesting images. He’s like that utility guy that always seems to see what’s cool long before the rest of us. The crazy moped advertising guys from this older post? My buddy was hired to train them. Who knew? On September 11, 2001, he happened to be living in an apartment just blocks away from Ground Zero and has painted a beautiful tale of what that day looked like. He’s got experience working for a Manhattan advertising firm, experience building cars for the motion picture industry (Transformers, anyone?), and a life-long love of cars, motorcycles, and lives that go too fast for the rest of us. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone when he started Frequent Flyer Productions while spending months-at-a-time on the road, traveling around doing nationwide advertising research. Frequent Flyer Productions is a full-service pre-production, shoot, and edit house for any video needs. When he wanted to update his identity, he called us to see if we could help. The twist is that many of his clients are Southern California females planning their perfect weddings, so the “go-fast, greaser, skull-n-crossbones” imagery wasn’t going to fly with the wedding crowd. We had to find a way to still be edgy, but not too scary for a princess. He settled on these (two alternate versions of the same brand):

And- as always, we created a few other marks that we thought were cool, so we don’t feel guilty sharing those with you.

Feel free to get a hold of us to see if we can hep you with your own branding needs. And do us a favor and head over to Frequent Flyer Productions for your video needs. They’re good people.

We’re in the process of rewriting the course descriptions for a local university so that they can include them in their recruiting materials for student prospects. The descriptions were written by one or more instructors in the given department and needed to be unified so that they each reflect the language of the university’s current campaign.

My first one was enjoyable. I decided to begin with the B.A. in Art outline. Not only do I know a thing or two about the field (*wink-wink, nudge-nudge*) but I just enjoy the world of academia and how it intersects with practical existence.

But then I chose Business Technology… and now I have a headache. Please, enjoy:

1. General Description of Major: Business Technology (also referred to as IT) has been a key enabler for organizational transformation. As businesses continue to grow and change, technology continues to play a strategic role in organizational planning and business operations. Most importantly, companies have been leveraging information technology to develop business intelligence and competitive advantages. As business requirements continue to evolve, the need for utilizing technology to meet the changing business environment also grows. As a result, the need for business and technology skilled workers has been growing rapidly. To meet these needs, companies have been looking up to higher educational institutions to integrate the concepts of business requirements and technology applications for data analysis, information management and business process improvements.

2. Who/What type of student would be interested in Major: The Business Technology program has recognized these trends and has been preparing students to meet these challenges as well as industry requirements. The program also continues to change its attributes to reflect the current industry requirements so as to prepare students with the necessary technical, intellectual and business communication skills. In addition, it equips students with key competencies to understand business processes and enterprise information systems to transform corporate cultures, operational methodologies and business practices to position the organization for strategic competitiveness and success. Our graduates have demonstrated success in meeting these business and technical requirements.

I have no qualms with business, or technology, or information, or IT employees, or progress, et al. And actually, I have no problem with the individual who wrote this course description. He or she is obviously in touch with what he/she does for a living and many of us rely on his/her expertise to keep the internet, networks, and all of the ones and zeroes in the right sequence. What I have a problem with is a guy writing advertising materials in such a way that only those on the inside know what on earth he’s talking about.

This post is definitely NOT just to poke fun at someone else or to revel in another’s oversight. This post is to offer you (the small/ large business owner) a reminder that your advertising language needs to have the personality of a face-to-face first impression.

Think about this: the most successful first-time meetings happen when one person is warm and inviting to the other and some foundational interaction takes place. Then, when both parties feel comfortable, some depth, complexity, and detail is added to the conversation. More often than not, when one person begins the conversation with awkward personal details or with the desire to look like the smartest, best, most perfect human specimen in existence, the other is turned off and the relationship starts an abrupt decline. When advertising, you have the ability to endear yourself to your potential clients- but you also have the ability to come on too strong (with esoteric language) and to do more harm than good.

Take a word of advice from this university who is hiring an outside agency to rewrite their copy- even when they have highly qualified people in-house. Good design (and essentially, good advertising) is about simple words and pretty pictures. Look us up, we can walk you through it.

Every now and then, we get hired to design something that involves multiple comps that are refined, rejected, and renewed until one is chosen and everyone lives happily aver after. Other times we get hired to design something and the client goes in a different direction than we’d hoped. This particular instance is neither of those.

For Eldorado Recording Studios (Burbank, CA) we were asked to update the brand and rebuild the site to signify new growth, new life, and to commemorate the new Great Park that is under construction right in its back yard. The guidelines were simple: respect the fact that they’ve been around for almost 60 years, have turned out some of the most respected recordings of all time, have a rich heritage in the Recording Industry, and are one of the last of the full-service, working high-end recording studios on the West Coast. Oh yeah, and “don’t make it look like we only record Country Music”.

This particular idea achieved all of the goals, except for maybe the last one. With a name like Eldorado, it’s hard not to mentally venture South of the Border or think of Cities of Gold. But we enjoyed making this one (*and then seeing it get rejected unceremoniously…*) and we feel that when the right time comes, we’ll put it on the chest of a hundred thousand t-shirts and make meeelions of dollars (he said with his pinky to his mouth).

Stay tuned for the launch of the new site with the actual updated Eldorado Recording Studios brand.

I was able to spend last week at the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Show in Anaheim, CA with Taylor Guitars. To give you a quick rundown, NAMM is an industry-only trade show held twice a year, but the Winter show is the big kahuna of them all. This is the place where manufacturers of all things musical launch their new products for the year- and they pull out all of the stops. My first year there, I saw my favorite guitar player idol (John Jorgenson), the actor Keanu Reeves, and the awkwardly captivating Elvira all in the span of 90 seconds. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to put their trade show booth into place and nothing is too excessive or over the top.

I started working as a freelance contract employee with Taylor about a year ago. Their marketing department hired me to help support the launch of a new guitar line at the show, and that relationship continued with monthly trips around the nation on what they call The Taylor Road Show, which is a national tour of in-store events where consumers are able to interact with the guitars, the manufacturers, and professional musicians in a casual atmosphere. It’s rare that a company would send out it’s employees, professional musicians as demo clinicians, and the most elite of its expensive items all for the sole purpose of letting end-users and consumers interact with them in a tactile way. Case in point, there is a section of each Road Show date set aside as the “Petting Zoo”, where customers are encouraged to play $10k custom one-off guitars. What company would do that? In addition to footing the bill to send employees, rare guitars, and preemptive local Road Show advertising to many of their US and Canadian dealers, they also invite other manufacturing teams to the plant for behind-the-velvet-rope tours to see how they turn a tree into an award-winning guitar. Not only do they invite the competition to come see manufacturing, but they’ll invite manufacturers from other fields (like the Automotive Industry) to view the workflow and production methods.

Having spent a little bit of time down at Taylor Guitars (located in El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego) with the marketing department, I was able to ask why an industry leader would be so open with their ideas. Conventional thinking says, “If we have an idea that is unique, we should hold on to it so that consumers know who the pioneers are and where to find that which they can’t find elsewhere.”

The response from Taylor’s Director of Product Development, David Hosler, has changed the way I view marketing. He responded by saying that Production is a very little part of the game. Anyone can produce anything. “By the time we show a product at NAMM, other companies have already duplicated it in hopes of riding the wave of success”, he said. So showing people the production process is not giving away anything that they can’t figure out on their own. No, real success comes from two other things. 1.) Success is Personality Driven, not Program Driven. 2.) You can never rule out the power of Creativity. Anyone can manufacture anything, but the company that continually brings something unique to the market is ultimately going to see success. And a company is able to bring something unique to the market when the role players in that company share a vibrant, engaging, creative, and passionate personality.

So what does this mean to you and your business venture? Content is King, and Creativity is his Queen. If you’re thinking that you have the “Super Product” that will pull the public away from their TiVOs long enough to rush out and buy one, then you may be in for a hard fall. If, however, you have any product at all, and you’re thinking that with some creative zigging, zagging, and tail-waving, you might be able to catch the public’s attention- now you might be on to something. Take it from the man who has had his hands in the development of the last 3 award-winning creations for Taylor Guitars, a company that does sales in the tens of millions each year: your creativity and your personality are ultimately more important than your product, because your creativity and personality ensure that a single successful product is not a fluke.

Perhaps it’s time to hire someone to share in the creative process and create your personality-driven campaign or product launch?

About a year ago, we were contacted by a group who wanted to launch a coffee venture. Being addicts ourselves, of course we jumped at the chance.

The initial pitch was that the coffee venture would act as a retail front for global social change. The principals were all professional church workers, but were hoping that this would act as more of a generic move for global change instead of a fancy public relations move for their respective churches. It was doing good for the right reasons instead of doing good to strengthen the individual congregations. Originally, the product was named Impact Coffee. They had a name, a tagline “Do You Have One”, and a graphic that showed a water droplet making a circular wake in otherwise still waters. Immediately we went to work trying to fulfill the need of creating a Corporate Identity. One of the first roadblocks we encountered was the fact that Impact is a fairly common name for coffee products. Small, independently owned coffee shops across the nation are called Impact and the name was even registered for a coffee distributor in the Northwest. Time for a plan B.

While working through the ideas, we tried to concentrate on the mission of the coffee. To be honest, a retail coffee shop, distributor, or roaster being used as a means of public awareness and social change is not a unique concept. Behind petroleum, coffee is the world’s second most traded commodity and with the popularity of Starbucks, many have taken notice of coffee’s penchant for being woven into the day-to-day tapestry of American behavior. So, in short, we weren’t going to be first or second to market with this idea. We wouldn’t even be 30th to market. But when you’re talking about improving social conditions, it’s okay to copy the idea, as long as the end result is more people affected by positive change. So what do you do when you’re 31st to market on an idea but you still want to be considered as a legitimate venture? Strengthen the presentation. For a story to be successful, both the content and the delivery have to be great. Hollywood has proven that even a less-than-unique story can see success if the presentation of that story is eye-catching. So we set our sights on strengthening the presentation.

The first step was to rename the venture with something more complex than “Impact”. Not only does the word “impact” have a harsh and abrupt ending with the letter “t”, but the definition of the word points to a singular and fixed moment in time. Once an impact is over, there’s nothing left to see. We wanted a word that not only carried on audibly, but pointed to a process more than an event. After doing some research, we found that the english words “amend” (where we get “amendment”), and “emend” come from the latin word “emendare” which means “to go back and make right”. Originally, we were pronouncing it Ah-men-DARE, but the scholarly Latin pronunciation is AY-mun-DAR-ay. It was less perfect because it added a 4th syllable and dropped the implication of the phrase “Men Dare”, as in “Brave men dare to do great things”, but it was still a good fit and a strong improvement over the original title.

We pitched a few visual ideas, but settled on a coffee cup that had a gentle and subtle arrow created from one of the lines. Not only does the arrow imply a counter-clockwise movement and flow from right to left, but the cup itself shows the handle on the left side, which would seem awkward to those who are right handed (no offense, lefties). The whole concept was to show the product, state the mission, and explain the name all in one brand mark.

This past weekend, we finished the in-store signage for the retail shop and we’re pretty proud to have been part of something that will be of benefit to the community.So what can we learn from this process?

1. One must be careful when choosing a name. It’s easy to go to one of two extremes: too much concentration or not enough thought. After having named three of my own children and one business, I understand the stress that goes into trying to see 15 years down the road to see if the name still stands up after so much time has passed. I also understand that each of us has baggage about names, whether it be for our children or our business ventures. But find some peace in Act II of Romeo and Juliet where Shakespeare writes, “…what’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet”. Spend enough time on your name to make sure that it’s not already taken, forgettable, or inappropriate. But keep in mind that your product is the smell of your rose. Labeling it flower or cheese is just to give people a way to find it again after they’ve enjoyed it once.

2. If your product isn’t unique, you must focus your efforts on your presentation of the product. Don’t forget, the iPod was NOT the first mp3 player on the market. Actually, it wasn’t even the second or third. But it was the one that was presented to the public as a lifestyle product and the gateway to cool.

3. Be prepared to take calculated risks. MANY businesses fail for a number of reasons- some foreseeable, others out of the hands of the principals. But the one thing that ties successful ventures together is that the drivers of the project took calculated risks on an idea, a market, a marketing strategy, or a business practice that might otherwise seem ludicrous on paper.

And now, I’m taking my ideas with me and heading out for a cup of coffee.

Every now and again, we see an advertising campaign that sticks with us. Which isn’t necessarily an endorsement of the caliber of its genius, it’s just the barometer of how different it is.The first of such cases is this campaign for the tv show, Desperate Housewives. The responsible advertising agency chose to print rubberized dummy stripes for parking lots at a boutique (read: expensive) grocery store here in Southern California. It reads, “This Parking for Desperate Housewives Only“. It’s an interesting way to help your market identify with the product. In a sense, it blurs the lines between who is the actual Desperate Housewife- the few who are paid millions to play them on television, or the many who are shopping for the family dinner at a local supermarket.
  

The second idea is one that is more bizarre than clever. But in advertising, the bizarre often gives birth to the successful. Once that happens, the bizarre idea is then relabeled as clever, as if it had been all along…  It’s complicated but part of the fun of playing the advertising game. It’s like gambling on the public’s tastes. So this particular campaign could be spotted on a sunny day in mid-December on Katella Blvd. (Disneyland’s front sidewalk). But you had to look quickly because it was five moped scooters, driven by five similarly dressed individuals, all with the same body type, posture, and driving skills, and all on the move at quite a clip. To be honest, I’ve never felt more like I was in the middle of a YouTube video than when the adver-parade passed me. So I did what any right-minded marketing person would do, I pulled out my trusty iPhone, dangerously fumbled with the buttons and tried to collect proof that I wasn’t going crazy or seeing quintuple. (Note to self: time to get the SUV’s dusty dashboard detailed…)
 

So what’s a business owner to think about these two types of unconventional advertising? Well, I think they’re a sign of things to come, in that the media is infiltrating our lives in more and more creative ways. Do people read magazines anymore? I know that I commonly Tivo shows for the sole purpose of being able to fast forward through the commercials. Classic advertising channels like magazine ads and commercials are a little less effective and therefore new advertising channels have to be explored. My parking space? My drive to the printer? These are just a couple of the new places that I’m being sold on new products. Having said that, the business owner must keep in mind that he or she needs to be prepared to explore the unconventional and the bizarre if he or she wants to compete in the marketplace. Additionally, more and more latitude must be given to the agencies to deliver on the promise of unique advertising and marketing. Designers and advertisers need to be a little left of center to be good at what they do anyway, why not utilize that commodity for your next successful campaign?

Lots and lots of space lately. And I don’t mean square footage- I mean space. As in, The Final Frontier.  

For starters, I just got finished with a design for Kip Fox’s new disc, Astronaut. He had some amazing players on this disc like Mark Hill, former Music Director from Kieth Urban’s band, playing bass; Shawn Pelton, who is an amazing NYC session ace and 20-year regular as the drummer for Saturday Night Live; and Gary Burnette, who plays guitar on much of the gospel, contemporary christian, and pop music you hear coming out of Nashville. It’s a spectacular project worth checking out at his site. The title comes from the metaphorical ruminations on popularity and life among the stars.  I’m pretty proud of the cover concept and am proud to submit it as a the entry for my Boy Scout Photoshop Merit Badge submission.
 
  
Secondly, I just submitted comps for the latest magazine ads for the BOSS RE-20 Space Echo pedal. The original RE-201 was an effect that guitar players would use and it created an echo effect based on reel-to-reel tape. It was large, expensive, but chock full o’ the mojo. So BOSS, the international industry leader in guitar effects pedals built a modernized, more compact, more feature-rich version called the RE-20 Space Echo.  I bought one last week to use as the test piece and it certainly delivers the vintage echo experience. 

For now, we at dog n’ moon are all spaced out. It’s time for some Rn’R for the holidays. Merry Christmas to all!  (and…er… to all a good night?)