Leaving a beloved pet with a young couple starting a dog day care might be tough if you can’t feel trust and a connection with their branding. The strength of a clear, memorable and yet trustworthy look and feel for a dog day care business led Lawrence Freese to DK. Well, sort of. He and his wife were close friends of ours. They wanted to give us a chance to prove ourselves, at a time when DK was still on training wheels in Seattle. It was a good match, because through our process they gained clarity on what they delivered, and we learned that we are a lot more than just logo designers. Efficient marketing begins with strong branding, in our humble opinion. We must’ve convinced Lawrence, because he hired us again when he began a second business as a general contractor for Portland homes.
Here is the Barka Lounge design, and the original post.
A logo design for a Portland startup business
We asked Barka Lounge’s owners to pick words to describe the “look and feel” for the image they wanted their new business to project. They came up with:
Professional. Sophisticated. Friendly. Playful.
These keywords then set the tone for the total branding package.
Because friendly and playful were such an integral part of the message, we wanted to create a personality. But without being too specific about exactly what kind of dog, or what features.
So we made a series of contour drawings like this one–which we created by cutting out paper to get the definitive edge. Keeping it simple and straightforward, we stuck with a black and white palette. The no-frills design says “sophisticated” and “professional.”
UPDATE: September, 2010
Just thought I’d add some of the images of the ad campaign we did for Barka, plus our business card designs.
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