SWR & Mesa Linda
I’ve been having fun posting up some more personal posts lately, but I’m way over-due (as usual) to talk about some of the projects I’ve been working on and more business related items, like this one.
About this time last year, I was approached by a business that manages time shares. With the upturn in the housing market, they wanted to return to their realty business. They asked me to design their logo, and really liked the brand I had created for the Southwest Land Alliance.
I told them we’d have to do something a little different, and we started out by exploring a design with an actual branding iron. That didn’t work, so the next idea was inspired by wrought iron ranch signs. After we decided on a black and white outline, I added a rusty texture to the design. Next, they asked me to design business cards and realty for sale signs, and told me they were going to have a sign-cutter turn the logo into a real metal sign.
That’s when I met Dan of DMD Machines. His business does all sorts of fabricating. We worked together to devise the best way to take my art from Adobe Illustrator and transfer it into the CAD programs he uses with the machines.
Dan referred a client to me needing some help. It was definitely a different approach for me on many levels. For one thing, it was the first time I’ve really worked with an individual and not a business. There’s no promotion or selling here, just pure aesthetics. It was also the first time, in a long time, that I was doing so much drawing in Illustrator, and at such a large scale.
The initial job brief was some photos provided by the customer of their dog, an Australian Kelpie, and the mountain range featuring Pagosa Peak; a few words and the idea, “For the foreground we’d like to represent our dog in a scene with a few elk or bear …..or something that represents the wilderness,” and we were off and running.
I told the person commissioning the project, “Some of my favorite subject matters: dogs (I currently have 6) & nature (why we live in Pagosa).” I think our collaboration and the love of the subject matter, made for a unique piece of yard art.