noises from dog n’ moon.

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?) 

What is the difference between a brand and a logo?

The two words are often confused and used interchangeably. In short, the logo is a part of the brand. The brand is the entire advertised image of a product or company. That brand includes a 1. logogram or logotype (shortened to “logo”) which is an icon, image, or symbol that represents the company or product as well as; 2. the colors, typefaces, and designed layout guidelines outlined by the brand “rules”. When people hire an agency for ”branding” they’re hiring an agency to help define the presentation of the company in print and online media. This branding involves creating “a look” for the company’s materials.There are conventions but no hard and fast rules for branding.

Some companies choose to use their own name written in a specific typeface (font) as the brand. One would see this with retail shops, like Crate & Barrel and Banana Republic. And this seems to be more common with high-end retail and corporations. The name carries prestige, so why detract from it by using an icon? The name and the typeface are the brand.  Other companies choose to use their name written in a specific typeface but featured in a specific layout as the brand. The Gap, with its square box enclosure would be an example of this. Other companies choose to use both a stylized typeface for the brand as well as a logo or icon. Shell Gasoline and Apple are examples of this kind of branding. Other companies choose to build the strength of the brand on the icon itself and are less specific about the supporting typefaces. Target has the circle-target icon, but uses a variety of typefaces in advertising. Nike uses the swoosh, but now offers multiple typefaces to delineate specific sub-brands. Still other companies try to build a brand based on “owning” a specific color. United Parcel Service (UPS) now even advertises under the nickname ”Brown” because of their ownership of that color. Home Depot uses the color orange exclusively in all of its advertising, branding, and in-store signage.

Again, there is no hard and fast rule about how branding should be done- and sometimes, the more risky or less conventional an idea, the more memorable it is. For some, just the title of the company is sufficient (Pottery Barn). For others, being able to use a logo or icon in place of the name is the goal (Apple or Westinghouse).I personally appreciate the use of an icon, simply because it’s a thumbprint that can be applied to products, and it’s as old as the idea of using a wax seal on communicative documents.

Another branch on the tree of Branding is Corporate Identity, which is the specific letterhead, business cards, and business collateral that one would use for official communication. It’s not campaign-based and has no advertising value or goals. Corporate Identity is simply the brand in its most unadulterated form. That’s not to say that Corporate Identity needs to be flat or pedestrian. Corporate Identity can be as designed and flashy as one so chooses. 

This was originally dated July 28th, 2005 and was posted on the site Church Marketing Sucks. Since I have changed servers and such over the last couple of years, it lost its place in the internet ether. Here it is, posted again for the world to read. Also, I touch on this case study a bit in a previous post, so you’ll get the update as well.

Last year, I had the chance to work with the perfect client. I say “perfect” because they were willing to pay me on time and in full (which is nice) and they were willing to pay me to be an artist. I’ve decided to give them their own place here in the Spring ’05 issue of the website not because I’m trying to schmooze them- but because other clients and designers could learn by the experience. Before I start. I wanna make it very clear that ANYONE can become a case study for being a great client. The people with whom I worked on this account were not superhuman and were certainly not without fault. Additionally, this job was plagued by many of the same cancers that attack any other job. There was an element of design-by-committee to this job (which sucks worse than getting poked in the eye every day for a month). There was indecision on behalf of my contacts, there were delays in the delivery of client-supplied materials (while the impending deadline remained fixed), and there was the all-too-common person who doesn’t “get it”. And it’s awfully frustrating to have most of the people look at the design and realize it’s genius and then have one person say, “…hmmm, don’t you think we could use a font like Helvetica instead of this one here… and it’s too (enter random-but-nonsense adjective here)… and can we fill up all of this unused space?“

 So I get a call in the Spring of ’04 about doing a rebranding package for a church who had just gone through a huge shake up. New pastor, new name, new outlook, new god (just kidding), new EVERYTHING. So they ask if I’ll meet with a preselected committee in charge of the church-wide redesign for the discovery phase (to steal a legal term). I sent in my proposal, they accepted and I followed up with a detailed contract outling the minutia of my services and the rationale for each movement. They delivered demographic research about their congregation as well as a packet of marketing pieces from other churches here in Southern California. They had done their research (the first reason I was excited to work with them) and were able to articulate what they wanted the final pieces to feel like (the second reason I was excited to work with them). ***Pay close attention to the wording. “FEEL” like. Not “look” like. There’s a huge difference. Clients often can tell you how they want something to feel, but they express it in terms of looks- and if they were prolific at converting emotional landmarks into printed and web-based design pieces, then they wouldn’t have any need for me. So it’s important to find a way to ask clients what feeling or emotional response is not being elicited from the current materials.This is where my creative side kicks in. Some folks ask, “this is business, not summer camp- what the heck do people’s feelings have to do with a good, strong logo-based e-business system information solution!?” You see, that’s what graphic design is for. Perhaps it can be art for art’s sake- but if I prefer to pay the bills then it has to be something that serves the client as a TOOL OF PERSUASION. Logos act as the handshake when someone first sees a company’s identity. Letterhead sends a preconceived message about the personality of a company or person. Design is meant to circumvent assumption when it comes to categorizing business. For instance, people have predisposed ideas about churches- some healthy, some not. But rest assured, when people share their views on the church, they are drawing from a lifetime of experiences of the organized church. When a church markets themselves as “God’s Garage” with an edgy, artsy logo, they send the message that “this isn’t the church your grandmother went to“. Or if they market the church as “The Sheep Fold”, it sends a message that there is nurturing and comforting going on. If the marketing is accurate, then one should not expect a mega-church with dynamic and elaborate services, rock n’ roll worship, and light shows (all of which are common here in Southern California). *** Back to the topic at hand… So we were talking about what emotional response was lacking in the original design and we began to talk a little bit about why the shoe didn’t fit, so to speak. The committee mentioned that the church was large, growing, strong, and dynamic but that there was no cohesion between the different areas of ministry or the different programs. There was no synergy. So they wanted a design that would send the message (outward and inward) that they are working as a single body with a single mission. Additionally, the logo that they supplied was a hard edged logo comprised of the 3-letter acronymn of the church in two boxes. Under that was written “ENJOYING GOD TOGETHER”. My immediate response was to mentally start building a new logo because if anything says enjoyment, it’s sans-serif fonts and razor edged boxes… er…*** As it turns out, they were happy with that logo and planned on using it. Now I had to find a way to use the given logo in such a way that’s its container would soften it up. Additionally, they said that they wanted the church to have the comfort level of a large christian coffee shop. Godbucks. Using this information, I drew up 5 sets of letterhead packages, each one using keywords like “growth”, “enjoyment”, “togetherness”, “comfort”, “casual”, “coffee” and synonymns. I can go into the details of each one but I’d rather wrap this up and get to the point. When I turn in comps to a company, I usually present them in the following order: 1. What they asked for specifically; 2. What I would suggest as a more artistic solution (client’s idea through the designer’s eyes); 3. And then finally the If-I-Were-In-Charge-Of-The-World comps. As a designer, I think it’s important to run the full gamut of artistic ideas.  ***And NOW would be a perfect time to give you the rules for doing design (or any service/production job). Designers need to use the good/fast/cheap rule. Tell yourself and your clients that they can only choose two. Good. Fast. Cheap. NEVER all three. ***  So this job allowed me to stretch my creative legs and I turned in my usual collection of their ideas + my ideas + the “What the Heck” idea. Nobody ever goes for the third idea because it’s just meant to be an excersise in creativity. So during the intial comp review, I gave my presentation, they looked through the comps and made comments on each one.

It was interesting to see how each one reacted to the designs because there’s a similar process to what happens when parents are choosing names for their children. My wife and I were thinking of names for another daughter and the name “Kim” came up. All I could think of was Kimberly Moody from Ponderosa Elementary School. She broke up with me in the 5th grade. On the playground. In front of a dozen or so other kids. And she ripped me a new one for being “dorky”. She said I never took off my Members Only jacket to play soccer with the cool kids. ouch. It was rough. Anyway, needless to say, we will not have a little moody kim walking around our house. That same principle is at work during design comp reviews. The client team is holding your artwork up against anything it has ever experienced and making comparisons. You thought you were doing something “bright and fun” but one of them sees the Tijuana market where they got lost as a 9 year old. Be prepared for it.

After going through the collection and going through the collection again and going through the collection a few more times, they started to trim away the fat. They agreed to pull one out, then two. Then a third. Then they sat staring at the last conventional one while holding the WhatTheHeck in another hand. Long story short, they kept looking at the WhatTheHeck and then someone asked, “what if we used this one?” The design consisted of the logo used as a denominator for an overall fraction. The numerator would always be whatever the item was printed on. letterhead. business card. postcard. envelope. It showed that even the mundane was part of the whole of the church. It was like using the church as a common denomination (get it?) and everything, large and small, fit into it somehow as part of the body. People and paperclips- EVERYTHING is a tool to spread this church’s message. So it caught on; the pastor loved it. The group loved it. We changed the numerators to be words that could be used as both nouns and verbs. For instance, the business cards had “contact.” as the numerator. The correspondence-style notecards had either “note.” or the person’s name (i.e. “todd.”) written as the numerator. An unconventional idea.

So here is the reason this was turned into a case study. This job represented the perfect cross section of the perfect job. “Perfect” doesn’t mean “without impediments”. It means “the job I’d love to get every day for the rest of my life”. There was a decent budget, clients who were willing to let the designer stretch his creative legs, a willingness to step a few inches out of the comfort zone, a belief that clean and clever marketing can be applied to bakeries, banks AND churches, and a willingness to “go hard or go home” when it came time to implement the design. They really ran with this marketing idea and started using it as a labeling format for everythign on campus. Right now, there is a 1500 seat, 2-level sanctuary in Southern California with a huge fraction painted on the outside wall that has “worship.” written as a numerator above the denominator of their logo. Most of all, the client allowed a designer to do what God has given him or her the talent to do: be creative. And it’s not just art for art’s sake. You’ll notice that a great deal of thought went into creating an image for the church using the given parameters and information. This wasn’t a logo-in-a-box job. So long as the designer is holding everything up against what the client has asked for, this is perfect design.