noises from dog n’ moon.

It has been since December that we’ve posted an update. We figured a quick glimpse into some of our work is long overdue. Not only have we been busy as usual with design, but plenty of other creative ventures as well. The only bad part of the last 6 months has been an April 1st hard drive crash that left us empty handed and brought business to an absolute standstill for weeks. You can imagine how NOT funny it was to have to explain to clients that, “no. This is not, in fact, an April Fool’s joke”. But, alas, three weeks and $1,900 in data recovery later, we were back up to speed with an arsenal of data backups to make sure we never have to experience that again. Our deepest apologies to all of the clients who were affected. We are doing our best to make it up to you in the second half of 2009.

Heading into the summer, we are trying to make sure that this blog doesn’t go dormant and then wake with a hail of artwork twice a year. Additionally, we are in the preparatory stages to expand what we do at Dog n’ Moon. We are excited about the next 90 days and look forward to sharing it with you.

In closing, we are reminded again that the reason we continue to come to work each day at Dog n’ Moon is because we believe that the world doesn’t have to be mundane, boring, pedestrian, or lifeless. We have exactly one chance to live life and we aim to inject some creative fire into the minutiae of life. From the way we wake each morning to the way we interact with those around us- and certainly to the way we do business and communicate with our customers, life deserves to be as rich and dynamic as we can possibly make it.

Happy Summer to all of you,
-the Dog n’ Moon collaborative team.

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.