Print Regional Design Annual 2009

Awhile back, we told you about our inclusion in Print magazine’s 2009 Regional Design Annual. Well, we got our copy in the mail the other day, and my oh my does it look awesome! It’s a HUGE honor to share pages with our heroes over at Methane and the awesome design team at Disney’s Yellow Shoes, among others.

As a special bonus we didn’t expect, they included some words about our work, too! The lovely people at Print asked us a series of questions and said that if it was interesting enough and if they had room, they’d include some of the answers. They did…So awesome!

Anyway, check out a few photos down below, but it’s way better in print. Not sure when the annual actually hits stands, but pick one up when you can – there’s some seriously inspiring work in there.

AIGA’s Always Summer ‘09

AIGA Jacksonville puts on some seriously awesome events. I was lucky enough to help organize and set up this year’s membership drive, Always Summer, a poster show celebrating summer jams. The idea was to have local designers and artists select songs that represented summer to them and then design a poster based on that. We set up shop in an old retail space in the Jacksonville Landing, complete with 50 some odd posters, a pair of DJ’s spinning the tunes, delicious beer from Bold City Brewery, food from Native Sun, and a cast of characters talking about the benefits of AIGA membership.

The event was a huge success and was a fantastic way to end the summer. You’ll see posters that Tim & I created in the photos below (taken by Tiffany Manning), but we’ll get around to taking photos of the posters up close sooner or later.

Extra kudos to Patrick Carter (pictured above) and AIGA Jax president Varick Rosete for taking the lead on getting the show together and making sure everything ran smoothly. Great job, dudes.

-Sean
Dog & Pony

Doogan McGugan & the future

Check out that little guy! Say hello to the yet-to-be-named-or-even-born child of Tim & Jen McGugan! I’m calling him Doogan for now.

Holy cow, right? Due early next year, this will be the McGugan’s first child. Tim claims that he (the kid) will be the first man on mars or end up figuring out how many licks it really does take to get to center of a tootsie pop. We’ll keep you posted on those things.

So let’s give a round of applause to Tim, he’s finally a real boy!

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On that note, now’s a good time to enlighten you all on our plans for the future of Dog & Pony. With Tim’s reduced role (you know…getting married, buying a house, remodeling said house from the ground up, having a kid, etc.), you may have noticed more and more collaborations on the latest posters. All of this has really made us re-evaluate the spirit of Dog & Pony and what the future means.

Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of people doing these posters (or screen printing for fun) in North Florida, and yet I still find myself surrounded by incredibly talented people that WANT to do just that. I don’t want to hog – and frankly can’t handle – all of the awesome work that Dog & Pony has allowed me to work on, so I’ve tapped these talented folks to contribute in their own individual ways. From Karen Kurycki’s amazing watercolors to Eric Blair, Kendrick Kidd and Caitlin Robinson’s ridiculous illustrations, and Crystal Floyd’s beautiful photos. These people are so so amazing at what they do, and working them is a true honor. Every poster becomes a whole new experience.

Sure Tim & I will take on our own poster designs, but from here on out we’d like to approach every project as a possible opportunity to work with friends…or someone that may just be a great fit for that project.

If you don’t mind my rambling, I’d like to give you a quick example. I was recently given the task of designing a poster for a very special Halloween screening of the 1922 silent Dutch film Häxan by my dear friend Tim Massett – who runs a small independent theatre in Duluth, Minnesota. This is an insane film about witchcraft/witch hunting/the devil. I highly recommend watching it sometime, or at least reading about it. Now, I love witchcraft as much as the next guy (…right…?), but someone who may be able to give me a little more insight and visual inspiration would be the extremely talented Clay Doran and his monsterly persona, Squid Dust. His work speaks for itself, he’s perfect for it! And for as long as we’ve been friends, we’ve never collaborated. So now’s the time. You’ll see the poster soon. It’s as insane as (if not a little bit more insane than) the film.

I guess the long-short of all of this is that Dog & Pony is naturally evolving into a collective of sorts. A very loosely organized group of incredibly talented creative folks creating awesome printed goods for awesome people.

And that’s that.
Keep Moving Forward.
–Sean Tucker/Dog & Pony Showprints

The Decemberists

We teamed up with the always amazing Eric Blair to create a poster for The Decemberists recent appearance at the beautiful St. Augustine Amphitheatre. It was loosely inspired by the song “The Rake” from their newest album The Hazards of Love. It was an interesting and time-consuming experience dissecting the very complex album with Eric and deciding what the focus of the poster should be.

It ended up being a 4-color print with some blue house paint, magenta ink, transparent black ink and a lovely flat black house paint. Printing went off without a hitch.

The show itself was fantastic. The band played through The Hazards of Love in full before going into some older fan favorites. They also threw in a ridiculous rendition of Heart’s “Crazy on You” with Shara Wordon and Becky Stark on lead vocals. The ladies stole the show throughout the evening. All in all a great experience, as usual.

Required Listening: My Morning Jacket

My Morning Jacket released their critically acclaimed album “Z” in 2005. I have to admit, I slept on this one. Maybe it was the other incredible music that came out that summer…or maybe the album was a grower that I couldn’t wrap my head around at the time. Either way, it took 4 years, but I finally get it.

Jim James and Co. made a ridiculously amazing record with catchy hooks, tight melodies, all out guitar jams, and a few slow burners in there for good measure. The band doesn’t take themselves too seriously, and everything on the album feels completely natural. Not to mention it has a pretty stellar album cover.

Have a listen to “Lay Low” – a fantastic 6-minute tune that highlights everything I love about the album. James’ reverbed near-falsetto voice over the minimalistic opening, a super tight rhythm section, dueling guitars, and a full-bodied and sprawling last-half of the track.

I always seem to point out that you need to listen to these records in their entirety to get the full effect of awesomeness that I’m talking about, and it holds true with this one too. So do it, and do it now.

My Morning Jacket’s Z on iTunes and Amazon.

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In Dog & Pony news, we’re sorry about the lack of updates. Stuff has been happening, we just need to get around to documenting it for yous guys. Here’s the short list of what’s to come:

• The Decemberists
• Tim’s future
• Always Summer poster show
• Häxan

Lucero

A few months back, we were contacted by Lucero’s management to create a poster for a stop of their upcoming tour. We were honored to make something for these alt/country/punk legends. How convenient that their closest stop to us was Café Eleven! Considering our dear relationship with folks at the Café, we jumped at the opportunity.

We passed the Tallahassee date over to our good buddies at Halftone Def. You should see the poster they did, its awesome…oh here it is! It’s always fun to see how different designers approach the same band’s music, but it’s especially fun when the other designers are your best good friends.

Anyway, check out what we came up with:

And some details:

It’s a spiffy 4-color print: white & orange inks, brown house paint, and transparent ghosty white ink. The photo was taken by the lovely Crystal Floyd. We’ve been looking for a way to use one of her incredible shots from her many visits to creepy abandoned buildings, airplane graveyards, salvage yards and the beautiful great outdoors. We were thrilled when she said we could use this awesome shot of a Nash Rambler becoming one with the earth.

Half of the edition went to Lucero, and the other half will be sold at the show in November. Whatever’s left after that will be up in our shop.

More exciting stuff coming up!

Inspiration: 826 National

In 2002, Dave Eggers, his wife Vendela Vida and educator Nínive Clements Calegari founded a writing/tutoring center in San Francisco. They named it the address of the building: 826 Valencia. Unfortunately, the city ordinances in the area only allowed for retail space. Interestingly enough, as building renovations continuted, it began to almost look like the hull of a ship. So it was cleverly decided that the storefront would become “San Francisco’s only independent Pirate Supply Store.” The store is in the front of the space, the writing center in the middle, and offices in the back.

It really is a brilliant idea that was only made better by some of the most clever writing and packaging that went along with the pirate supplies. What follows are some of those products, beautifully designed by Office.

It didn’t stop there. When it was time to expand the 826 writing centers around the country, each center determined what their storefront would be. Boston: The Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute; Chicago: The Boring Store (a secret agent shop), Los Angeles: The Echo Park Time Travel Mart, Michigan: The Liberty Street Robot Supply & Repair, New York City: The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., Seattle: The Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co.

Every store has been meticulously designed from the inside-out and each product they carry is so cleverly written and beautifully designed by local artists and designers. Below is just a small taste of the national products.

A wonderful little catalog was released not too long ago by 826 National. It gives a thorough description of the organization (which Dave Eggers also hilariously explains in his recent TED talk) as well as fully describing each product and the program they support.

This is truly brilliant and inspiring stuff. We are strong believers in creative thinking from a very young age, and everything about the 826 National organization is a true testament to the power of creativity and design.

All images from The Dieline.

Support the Movement pt. 2

A few weeks ago, we showed you a shirt we created for Tim to wear to the Jaguars‘ training camp.

The idea stemmed from a press conference and subsequent tweets by the Jaguars’ star running back, Maurice Jones-Drew.

Needless to say, the movement (and our shirts) picked up pretty quick. Pretty much all of our friends were asking us to print shirts up for them and we were happy to oblige. We started growing our beards for the team and printed up a solid batch of shirts

Then it got around the office. If you know anything about us, you know that our day job involves doing some actual advertising for the Jaguars. We’d been working on strategies to help sell tickets for the team this year when the big guy upstairs – Jim Dalton, that is – saw Tim’s shirt. He loved the idea and saw tons of opportunity for the Jags. He also had a meeting with them that afternoon. Long story short, it was presented to the team and they loved it. We passed along a shirt just in case Mr. Jones-Drew would be interested in wearing it.

Then came the real fun. First MoJo showed up online wearing the shirt to announce a new Facebook contest.

Then BeardCam shows up at the game. A moving beard shows up on the Jumbotron over people’s faces.

Then the man himself is wearing our shirt in all it’s glory in the gameday program.

And finally, the big one. The Jags took our logo and had it printed in full color on t-shirts to sell at the game!

That took a little of the burden off our backs of hand-screening our image onto shirts for random people we don’t know, and it helps the Jags make the money they need. The shirts look super nice, and we couldn’t be more proud. We’ve printed a lot of shirts ourselves to get the idea out there and for all those that wanted to Support the Movement, but seeing the concept and design embraced by our team and the fans is so much more rewarding. It really just goes to show that a good idea and a solid execution can really go places.

And yes, we’re still printing shirts.

Support the Movement.
Dog & Pony Showprints

Gil & Amy pt. 2

As promised, here are some more detail shots of Gil & Amy’s wedding invitations. This is how the whole package came together. Simply stunning. Design by Varick Rosete/Russel Quadros. Printing by Dog & Pony Showprints.

Lightboxing

Last Thursday, I participated in a crazy live design battle called Lightboxing. I won’t go into the details of the event – the AIGA blog has taken care of that – but these photos by the wonderful Tiffany Manning seemed to sum up the evening pretty well.

Congratulations and continued respect to the impeccable Mr. Russel Quadros. Many thanks to AIGA Jacksonville, ReFresh Jacksonville and Paul Figura for giving us the arena in which to battle. And a HUGE thanks to Veer for the awesome photos, typeface and free swag! It was a hugely successful event and I can’t wait to see who steps into the Lightboxing ring next time.

-Sean – Dog & Pony –