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...
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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
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We’re big fans of campaigns. In short, we want things to match. That doesn’t mean that we always need to be wearing a one-color outfit or that everything in our office is washed in a single print- it means that peace comes from having ideas and elements organized in a logical manner.  Having said that, you can imagine how we jumped at the chance to design a series of cards advertising an ongoing Choral Concert Series. In the past, these announcements had been made on black and white copies created in-house by an employee who probably had other duties. Convincing the client...
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Have you ever considered what it would be like to sell 1M of a product? A million records is a platinum selling record, something that very few artists actually achieve. Now consider that the product is something more than music (an item universally loved by all mankind)- but rather applies to a niche market. An international company with corporate offices in both Japan and the US has sold one million guitar amps in their “Cube” amp line. As the name implies, it’s cube shaped and comes in an assortment of models, ranging from a battery-powered practice amp to a stage-ready...
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I can’t take credit for this idea, since another designer shared with me his theory of “angel projects”. One way to be a designer without losing your soul is to take on an Angel Project every now and then. It’s a project that offers no financial benefits whatsoever, but is fun to work on and offers an extra dose of creative latitude in place of payment. Also, when you’re approached to work on a project with little to no budget, you can say that you’re already working on an Angel Project. Not only does it clearly distinguish between what you’re doing...
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St. John’s Lutheran Church, in Orange, CA asked us to solve a problem for them. Having been around for more than 125 years, they had a balance of power that needed a refresh so that individuals from within the church could rise up and take ownership in forwarding the goals of the congregation. Imagine if your garden variety large company decided to do away with a CEO and instead create a base of Vice Presidents to run the planning and operations. Neat idea, right? Now, imagine that you have to find a way to communicate this change to the rest of the company… do you do it in an...
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This past Fall, we were asked to lend a hand to Concordia University Irvine’s Graduate Admissions Department. In conjunction with a strategic email campaign, we created a couple of hardcopy direct mail pieces, meant to pique the interest of those on the email lists. Of the 4, the last two were comps that were passed over. A wash of color taken from the university’s brand tied it into the look, but it had little “wow” factor. The bright yellow was eye-catching, but in advertising, it’s not just the ability to draw attention. It’s the ability to convert...
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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...
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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...
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This was for a buddy’s upcoming sermon series at his church. Another exercise in getting in touch with my feminine
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