It was a fine summer and fall of music-making for The Melvilles (Karl’s side gig) – full-on electric shows at the Fine Line and Lake Harriet Bandshell and acoustic sets at the new and highly successful Fulton Farmers Market – and we helped promote their events with colorful, feel-good posters. Our goal is to create a distinctive look and feel for The Melvilles, and give a nod to the event location, setting or season. Without an outside client, this has been a great opportunity for us to explore different ways of creating eye-catching and impactful design. Exploration makes us better designers.

We’ve gotten lots of questions about the typeface used in these posters. It’s called Goshen, and was created by Bill Moran of Blinc Publishing in St. Paul. It’s one of a series he worked on using old wood block type. You can find it and more at Chank.com.

You can click here to learn more about The Melvilles, and email us directly if you would like to be on The Melvilles’ email announcement list.

FieldCandy is a British company that uses high-resolution large-format printing technology to take camping tents to a whole new level. They’ve employed the help of several designers and photographers to create limited edition graphic treatments of each tent fly. See some of our favorite examples from their collection below.

The FieldCandy mission is to “inject colour, creativity and fun into the camping space by offering a range of totally unexpected designs. We want to delight you with our products. The average tent we believe isn’t fun, they all look the same, we don’t think that’s right. A tent should say something about who’s inside it, our tents are fun, exciting, iconic, individual and simply unmissable.” Don’t we all deserve that? See the whole catalog here.

Metro Dogs Daycare & Boarding has opened for business in the Minneapolis North Loop neighborhood. This is the culmination of many, many months of hard work by owner Amy Rosenthal – turning a life-long love of dogs into her dream business.

We designed the identity for Metro Dogs early on, and have been working hand-in-hand with Amy on ads, signage and this website in preparation for the Grand Opening. After a ribbon cutting on Friday, there’s a big Open House in celebration this Saturday from noon until 3. Stop by – and bring your dog.

But check out her site first. We designed it to be a reflection of Amy and how she runs her business – straightforward, no-nonsense, dog-centric, and full of puppy-love passion. We worked with Clay Johnston at Sprung Interactive for the WordPress development.

Here’s the site.

The wonderful thing about this show is that it was not a graphic design competition. It’s a sampling of the diversity and influence of women’s design work in Minnesota over the last 30 years and continuing today. Celebrating a wide range of powerful work – advertisements, branding campaigns, graphics, posters, publications, furniture, products and industrial designs – it recognizes the contributions that women have made to the profession.

Minnesota is blessed with a large, incredibly supportive and smart design community. The 23 designers, chosen by committee to represent a cross-section, had to be professionally prominent, longtime Minnesotans who had demonstrated “leadership, innovation and influence” in the wide-open field of design. The show received a large amount of press coverage, including this nice article in the Star Tribune on November 3.

The show runs through this Sunday, November 13 at the College of Visual Arts Gallery – so there is still time to catch it before it’s gone (details below).

– Susan

Hours:
Today, Thursday 12 – 8 pm
Friday 12 – 6 pm
Saturday and Sunday 12 – 4 pm

Photos courtesy of the College of Visual Arts and Bill Kelley Photography.

Susan is honored to be among the 23 industry-leading women selected to exhibit their design work at the CVA Gallery from October 27 through November 13, 2011. Criteria for selection included leadership, innovation, influence, accolades for design excellence, and longevity in Minnesota. Details on the event can be found here.

ready steady bang – 30 ways from Ed Barrett on Vimeo.

There’s also a very helpful short video about how Mapnificent can be utilized.

Entrepreneur Amy Rosenthal, came to us for a brand identity for Metro Dogs, a new dog daycare and boarding business opening this Fall in downtown Minneapolis’ North Loop. The StarTribune recently reported 100’s of new apartments are headed for this sprouting riverfront neighborhood – and along with high-density comes dogs.

Check out the cool stuff we created for her – a logo, color palette (mailman blue, grass, fire hydrant red, etc.), and fun “report card” symbols (good, sleepy, sad, etc.). We are now working on a website, signage and promotions which will be ready for the business’ opening.

In the meantime, they have a Facebook page up and running with updates and more information. Please go like them… and spread the word.

By the way, in June we authored a guest blog post on Winthrop & Weinstine’s Duets Blog on the topic of brand names using the word “Dog.” Seems the positive associations people have with dogs are good for brands – even for those that have nothing to do with dogs.

In June, the Episcopal Church in Minnesota hosted the triennial Episcopal Youth Event (EYE) that brought together 1500 youth for workshops, fun and worship. The focal project was construction of a Zero-Energy House being donated to East Central Habitat for Humanity for a deserving family.

We were asked to design a special T-shirt with one design to work on three shirt colors (supervisors, adults and youth) for the Minnesota contingent of about 250. And they were needed within the week! We jumped right on it and had some fun!

Here are a few concepts and the final design, masterfully printed by Wentworth Screen Printing.