noises from dog n’ moon.

A Costa Mesa, CA megachurch hired us to build the visuals for a recent sermon series. The premise was that each person has their own “bucket list” of things that they want to accomplish before dying. In coming up with the message, we racked our brains making our lists just to see which ones were more universal. Beyond that, part of the brainstorming was to find archetypes of bucket list events. The one that we kept coming back to was The Running of the Bulls in Pamplona. It seems like one of those things people wax poetic about doing before they die. We chose it as one of the central visual messages of the campaign.

Azusa Pacific University sends out a team of musicians each summer on a tour of the nation. This is the second year that we’ve had the pleasure of designing their concert posters for the venues. A very nice compliment to us- they were unable to choose between the designs and opted to send two of these to press.

The Community Action of Ventura County folks asked us to build some posters that would be placed inside city buses in Ventura County. The message was to promote their Home Energry Assistance Program for low-income residents, which is a project to help residents improve their home for better energy conservation. It’s good for the residents and ultimately it helps the State of California in times of economic and energy crisis. In the pat, some of the ads featured despondent and downtrodden people, but we chose to use more uplifting and empowering visuals.

Not only were we hired to do the artwork for this music project, but our very own Corey Witt played guitars and wrote two of the six songs on this jazz fusion project by Rosy Rosenquist. For our directions, Rosy pointed out that he loved clean spaces, zen-like tranquility, and stark whites. But he also wanted us to make sure that the exclamation point in the title was a point of interest as well. He liked the idea that one could be in a place of peace but also feel compelled into action by the music. For the last comp, we took some liberty with the title, changing “hear now!” to “you are hear!”- a more existentialist approach to the same message. Rosy spent 9 months in Japan and really fell in love with Japanese culture. We tried to build at least one idea that brought those visuals to the table- and lo and behold, he chose it. Alternate comps are below.

This was for a project for Azusa Pacific University’s International Music Institute. We put together two quick ideas. They chose the second because of the depth and richness of the visuals.

A local university hired us to advertise their most recent musical, which was to be a retelling of some classic stage shows in a new and unique way. The main stage elements were large geometric shapes and most of the costumes were created in shades of grey. The toned-down visuals were meant to make the music and the story the focus, as opposed to the pomp and circumstance of the normal stage fanfare. These were meant to be “tangible”, user-friendly renditions of well-loved stories. We chose to build the artwork to convey that same message.

For this project, we were asked to build some stock thank you cards that a local megachurch could send out to its volunteers and helpers. They had to be non-event-specific and as close to gender neutral as possible. Here are the comps for the project.

Open up Guitar Player Magazine and you may see some of our handiwork. The core of the final was our idea, but the fit and finish was done elsewhere. Here is a photo of the final as it appears in the April issue as well as a couple of passed over comps.

The product is called the RE-20 Space Echo and it’s a reissue of a guitar effect that was originally introduced in March of 1972. The original was well-loved, but huge and inconvenient. The manufacturer reissued the effect in a compact box that can be turned on and off by foot switch while a player is on stage playing guitar. We tried to play off of the 1972 roots as well as the product name.

So there’s this company in Lafayette, LA that makes guitars out of carbon fiber, which if you didn’t know, is like space-age material that is feather light and really sturdy. Making a guitar out of it allows them to provide musicians with something that sounds good and doesn’t need to be handled with kid gloves like a fragile conventional acoustic instrument.

The challenge was to emphasize the value of the product while dealing head-on with the fact that acoustic guitar lovers have a romantic attachment to the heritage of acoustic instruments and the skilled craftsmanship that is attached to woodworking for guitars. It’s essentially hundreds of years of progress compared to a really cool contemporary twist on that heritage. Here are the campaign one-sheets that were passed over (but we’re really proud of them).

This one isn’t actually from the flea market. It’s actually the final brand. But I didn’t want to break the flow of the maxi-post. Expect the updated site soon. We’re working on finalizing the content right now.

The goal here was to emphasize the great history and heritage of Eldorado Recording Studios in Burbank, CA. Grammys, Platinum Recordings, and superstars are not out of place here and they’re one of the oldest studios in Los Angeles. The design brief pointed out that we wanted to push equally on the name, the birthday (1950′s), and the hip factor- all without making the studio look like they specialize in country music.