Band Logo

I have the good fortune of being the friend of a talented divorce lawyer.  It's not what you think.  He and I shared office space when I worked out of the Carlson Towers.  Dan Fiskum moonlights as a band member in a band called the "British Blue Tits".  To offset the interesting name, we made sense of it with this graphic treatment.

Logo Lounge 7

Here at SGA, we love Logo Lounge.  If you are in the creative field, you know how expensive it can be to submit your work to the various award shows and design publications.  For a small yearly fee, you can have access to gazillions of logos on Logo Lounge for inspiration.  In addition, all of your marks uploaded, get considered for publication.  It's the best deal EVER.  

We are pleased to announce we have 5 marks included in the latest installment, Logo Lounge 7.

Best of Show x2

A while back I created these two ideas for a series we developed for AIGA MN veteran designers.  I am happy to report both won "Best of Show" in Logo Lounge 6.

General Mills Icons

We had fun working with General Mills internal communications.  They needed a series of icons to identify important ideas that would increase their corporate efficiency and maintain quality.

Westwood Banners

Westwood Lutheran Church in St. Louis Park asked us back to create a large banner for their sanctuary. They needed the graphics to reflect the main messaging ideas they had planned for the coming year. We had fun exploring visual metaphors for "The Church Unleashed" that were positive and compelling.

Evolution not Revolution

Some logo designs don't need a complete make over... they just need an adjustment to bring them up to date or more usable.  Here's a perfect example.  We were asked to update this local brand.  Notice how the previous logo had a logo mixed with logotype.  The use of this mark on small packaging labels proved that it wasted precious real estate and reproduced badly when the printing wasn't premium.  Our solution kept the essence of the brand but made it cleaner and more efficient.

Old Mark:

New Mark:

Mega-Workout

Continuing to work with Worlds of Wow, we had fun designing a mark for a California's church fitness program.

Children's Ministry Logos

We worked this summer on a series of logos for a large mega-church in California.  Working with the amazing people at Worlds of Wow out of Texas, we designed a unique logo for each group in their children's ministry.  Even though each one was unique, we kept the style elements the same so collectively they still feel like a family of marks.

I'm showing the initial style direction we explored that we really liked here at SGA.  The rest are the final marks that I also think are also very successful and reflect the personality of the client.  Special thanks to Audrey on the final marks.  She really had the vision for this series.

Babe

Marty Harris created this lovely illustration of Babe the blue ox for our client. 

Storyboards

For a long time, storyboard work for us has been slow.  I think client budgets for commercials has found it's way to online creative since 2008.  However, recently we've been asked to work on a number of storyboards.  We've been working with our client, Anderson-Mraz, out in Spokane, Washington and most recently with a neighbor just down stairs.  The budget range widely and we can accommodate the simple to the complex as shown below.  Special thanks to Marty Harris, Jonathan Koelsch and Joe Thompson.

Campaign Graphics

Schwartzrock Graphic Arts serves other creative agencies (we sometimes work directly with end-use clients).  Recently, we've been asked by Initio3i to create the graphics system for a smaller, regional hospital's advertising campaign.  As you might have noticed, health care systems have been gobbling up smaller hospitals and clinics in an effort to remain competitive in the changing health care marketplace.  Our client merged with two other local providers in an effort to stay independent and local.  

To build a campaign around the benefits of staying independent, we collaborated with creative genius, Viet Do, who delivered the messaging components and we assembled the visuals to make it as memorable as possible.  To keep the message as authentic as possible, we worked with veteran photographer, Greg Wanbaugh, who gave us wonderful photos on an extremely limited budget and even smaller time table.

Brand Extended into Advertising

In the previous post, I showed you an identity system that consisted of a family of products.  We needed to extend that brand esthetic into a series of ads that built on the same ideas that made the logos successful: safe, simple, natural, easy.  Copy: Jennifer Kohnhorst 

Logo System

Sometimes, a brand is more complicated than just one logo.  Recently, I worked on this brand for a medical device company.  We started with their superstar product, but needed to consider their full-range of sister products.  In this case, we focused around the technology that makes this product unique, and built up from there.

Hero Cover

A couple of posts back, I showed you some masthead designs we've done for Kingstone Comics.  If you have followed this blog, you probably also remember that for a time, I drew comic books full time for Community Comics. Kingstone recently started a new series called Hero Bible Devotions.  This time they asked us to design the masthead AND illustrate the front cover.  With the amazing talent of Joe Thompson on colors, Audrey's design and Sherwin's illustration, this is what we delivered.

Initio3i Logo

Initially, I designed this mark for Initio Advertising. I started by creating a custom typeface, then I added a unique element to it that focused on the major change in the advertising industry: instead of broadcasting messages to the masses, clients through advertising communicate one-to-one with their audience. Great! Later, the company split into two legal entities and the "3i" was added to the mark.  Not so great, but they lived with it for a while.  Finally, realizing that the personality and position of the new company now revolved around the definition of 3i, we refined the same concept into a simpler, more memorable mark.  Not an ideal process, but we found success in spite of it.

More Comic Book Masthead

I know it's been a long time since we last posted.  As you may know, we create the masthead designs for Kingstone Comics. Here's some recent work.

Our Target field mascot designs go live!

Check out our silly mascots we designed for Target field! Some of you have had the privilege of seeing these big headed guys live at the Twins opener over the weekend--to those of you who missed out, check em out in action on CBS's website!