New Political Pimp designs!

As the elections ramp up to full-throttle, we thought we should do our part as Americans, as designers, and as huxters to create art that adds to the whole spectacle. Several months ago, ADG’s founder, Joel Anderson started creating few political prints to encourage folks to cut through the spin and find out what each party is really selling. (The candidates and the media are always selling us something. They might talk about the economy, but WE are actually producing products that create jobs and stimulate the economy!) We even set up a new store section on our web site called Political Pimp to make our cheeky, inspiring and irreverent designs available to poster fans of all political stripes.

After Republican Mitt Romney picked running mate Paul Ryan, and President Obama decided to stick with Joe Biden, we knew that the stage was set for a few months of entertaining full-out smack-down campaign combat. We asked our intern Aaron Johnson (who will be a full-time staff designer soon) to contribute 2 sets of designs for the under-30 crowd. Aaron delivered with the devilishly funny roll-play-card-game-inspired Campaign Combat series and the hip, adorable 8-bit Multi-Player Melee series.

Then veteran staff artist Ligia Teodosiu came up with 2 prints that celebrate great presidents from each party. The quotes she selected for each of the presidents are inspiring and informative.

The whole series has turned out to be a lot of fun... we hope they get people thinking about the issues, our economy, and our nation’s future.

After we finished all of the poster concepts. Joel took the designs and created 3 collectible postcard sets:
• One set for Republicans,
• Another set for Democrats,
• And a third set for folks who are either undecided, or just want to own a copy of every design in this series.

All the prints are for sale on our site from now until the elections, and they will be featured on Fab.com in a sale that runs from August 30th to September 3rd.

These ready-to-frame designs look great on the wall. Get yours while you can—these are limited edition prints, and they are already going fast!

Ram Trucks Ad Series

We were recently asked by The Richards Group, America's largest independent ad agency, to create a series of posters that would double as print ads for Ram trucks. They had seen our Art and Soul of America poster series, and really wanted to apply the rough, WPA-era aesthetic to their ad series.

The ads would be totally illustrated, and would feature the 2012 line of Ram Trucks in scenic vistas in and around various Texas State Parks. The fact that they would be completely illustrated was a big departure from most vehicle ads (and ads in general) because the item being advertised would be solely interpreted/displayed through illustration, which we believed was imperative to maintaining fidelity with the vintage style.

This was the mission: The Ram Truck brand would capture the beauty of Texas landscape in a series of 4 retro-inspired print ads Placed in the Annual Hunting and Fishing Guide. Ram Trucks would be the ‘Official Automotive Sponsor’ of the guide. They wanted us to help them create art like the Illustrative posters created in the 1930s and '40s that stirred the public’s imagination for travel and adventure. They sent us these old WPA posters for inspiration:

This is how the process worked: The creative team at the Richard’s Group wrote some great text for us to infuse into the poster designs. Their art direction team provided us with mock-ups of the general look and feel for each ad and poster, along with beautiful truck photography. Staff designer/illustrator Andy Gregg sketched up scenes that included the landscape, typography, and the truck. Then he set to work rendering 4 Ram Truck ads featuring illustrative renderings of the Lone Star state’s picturesque Rio Grande Valley, Balanced Rock, Enchanted Rock and Lighthouse Rock landscapes as settings for the Ram 1500 Mossy Oak Edition Outdoorsman, Ram 2500 Power Wagon, Ram 1500 Lone Star and Ram 1500 Laramie Longhorn.

The designs took about a month to complete, and we decided to unify the designs more by style, rather than color palette. (A special thanks to intern Aaron Johnson for help with some of the backgrounds as turnaround got tight!)

One component of an authentic vintage poster design is typography. We did extensive research on classic hand-lettering. 2 sources of inspiration came from old bus tickets and from antique typewriter ribbon tins:

It was quite a job to capture the likeness of each vehicle, without adding too much detail. The vintage style prints we were emulating were screen printed in limited colors, so there was a fine line between rendering perfect detail and creating an authentic classic illustration. Andy handled it perfectly.

“This was the perfect opportunity to take a different creative approach,” said Olivier Francois, Chief Marketing Officer, Chrysler Group LLC. “The use of vintage type-styles, hand-rendered illustrations and muted color palettes create a nostalgic approach to advertising art that we hope will resonate with consumers just as the original posters helped romanticize each national park destination.”

In addition to print ads, posters and postcard sets created from the advertising artwork. They are available for purchase at:
www.ramtrucks.com/outfitter
www.AndersonDesignGroup.com/HorsepowerNationalPark

Here is a look at the 4 finished poster designs and postcard set:

Denny’s Tour of America

We have been selling our classic American travel posters in flash sale events on Fab.com since summer of 2011. This national exposure—in addition to selling them on our own site—has caught the attention of art directors from some big national ad agencies. When the agency for Denny’s Restaurants (Erwin Penland) saw our classic American illustration and design work, they asked us if we could help them create a new look for the Denny’s Tour of America menu.

Each summer, Denny’s creates new all-American dishes for their menu, and they give it a travel theme. It made perfect sense to marry our vintage travel poster look with their menu concept. Our new pals at Erwin Penland (EP) were great to work with. They wrote the text, shot beautiful food photos, laid out the menu, and commissioned us to create 7 illustrations and a logo. The illustrations included: a menu cover and 6 American cities or regions that inspired special dishes featured in the Tour of America menu.

We started with the Tour of America logo. Staff artist Andy Gregg worked under Joel Anderson’s creative direction to design a logo that evoked the glory days of American road travel. After a few sketched concepts, the creative team at EP pitched our logo to the decision makers at Denny’s. They loved the design, and the process moved ahead with ease.

Next, the chefs in the Denny’s test kitchens developed some tasty looking new dishes. (We never got to sample the food during the process—we just got teased with gorgeous, mouth-watering photography of each featured menu item!)

Once the recipes were tested and confirmed, the art directors at EP assigned the 6 travel destinations that went with the menu items. We had our list of American cities & regions, and we set out to illustrate travel posters for each one. Andy worked on the menu cover, which was to suggest a taste bud adventure, exploring America from coast-to-coast. Joel worked with Ligia Teodosiu and Shelby Rodeffer and Andy Gregg to come up with the other 6 illustrations.

Once all of the illustrations were approved, the design team at EP took our art and skillfully integrated it into the menu design. The result was classic and delicious-looking!

Everyone liked the art so much, they wanted to see it as illustrated travel prints and collectible postcards. So we created the Denny’s Tour of America collection and now offer these beautiful posters and cards on our Studio Store site: AndersonDesignGroup.com (then click on SHOP and pull down the Denny’s Tour of America Collection.)

 

The campaign has been a success for Denny’s. We have enjoyed working with them and the great folks at Erwin Penland to blend classic art with modern advertising! Our pals at EP were proud of the outcome, too. To thank the folks at Denny’s corporate, they commissioned us to create a custom version of the menu cover that was framed and hung on the wall in the EP offices and teh Denny’s corporate headquarters. Notice how we added the EP and Denny’s corporate buildings to the landscape!

2012 Austin City Limits Music Fest Poster

Recently, we were asked by C3 Presents (an event organizer responsible for some the country's biggest concert events) to create the official poster for this year's Austin City Limits Music Festival. We were honored and excited, and staff designer/illustrator Andy Gregg was put on the task.

C3's poster needs and parameters were somewhat unique: they wanted to feature an Austin skyline, and they needed three different versions of the poster to sell on their website, sort of a "good, better, and best". Andy worked on this problem for a while. Posters from ACL's past were sometimes printed different ways to denote their tier of quality (e.g. last year's high-end print was a five color gravure print), but it was often hard to distinguish the different levels from a distance, and especially over ACL's website. The concept developed in layers, but eventually Andy arrived at this design:

The shaded-in area of this rough thumbnail would act as the good and the better versions of the poster at 18"x24", while for the best version the wider landscape would be added to create a poster at 36"x24".

This is the final art for the good and better designs. It features a band on stage, with a condensed skyline in the background and, of course, the famous Austin bats. The city landscape is stylized and uses bright colors, because we and the client both wanted to stay away from anything that felt too stereotypically western. All the lettering is custom. Though the designs are essentially the same, when printed the good version will be a 5 spot color print with a run of 3,000. The better version will be silk screened (by our friends at Kangaroo Press) and numbered, with a final run of 500.

Last but not least, the larger poster was built from the original. The extra space was exploited to add local Austin landmarks like the South Congress neighborhood, UT Tower, and Barton Springs, along with many others. This design will also be silk screened, but on cotton rag and by DL Screenprinting in Seattle. It will be numbered and signed, with a final run of 100.



 This was a fantastically fun project to work on, and an illustrator's dream. Now we've just gotta catch a flight to Austin for the festivities...

NEW Coastal Collection

As you can see, we’ve been dreaming of vacation all summer. Now that we have cranked out a bucket full of new designs to create our latest poster series, we probably will do just that!

For quite some time now, have had a lot of interest from the buyers at Fab.com (and from decorators & fans) in vintage-looking posters with nautical or coastal themes. So we decided to create the COastal Collection and get it done while it was still summer time! Since we could not get away from our drawing tables and iMacs, we put on our flip flops and tacky Hawaiian shirts and started creating breezy, whimsical seaside prints. (We tried wearing sunglasses, but it kept throwing off our color perception!) Our goal was to create art that would look great in a vacation cottage. For land-lubbers, we tried to illustrate art that would transform any ordinary room into a slice of Paradise.

We drew our inspiration from vintage travel posters, magazine ads, restaurants, match book covers. Our style was based on nostalgic illustrative design. We used color, fonts and open space to conjure up feelings of relaxation, escape, amusement, comfort, and leisure. Bright colors, nautical icons, and silly phrases made us smile, so we used them to the fullest. Once we put together 24 poster designs, we created a postcard set, and launched a full line of ready-to-frame prints in two sizes: 18" x 24" and 11" x 14".

See the entire collection on our Anderson Design Group Studio Store site. If you cannot get to the coast this summer, do the next best thing and turn a room in your home or office into a seaside getaway!

Grand Opening of Legato Gelato!

As designers and branding consultants, we are always meeting smart, passionate people who come to us with big dreams. They usually show up with a plan—a vision and a concept that needs an image— and they ask us to help them make it a reality. (It is a big responsibility to be entrusted with the hopes and dreams of people who have put everything on the line!) These brave trailblazers are bringing about America’s economic recovery, providing jobs and zest to their communities, and it’s an honor to be a part of their success stories!

When Terri-Ann and her husband Berchaun asked us to help them create the branding for a new gelato cafe, they brought us samples of her frozen desserts. We were blown away by how good this gelato tasted! We knew that Legato Gelato was world-class stuff that would be made right here in Nashville, TN. We were given a few months to create a logo and help them to develop a branded look for the new shop, which was set to open on June 15th, 2012.

We sketched up several different looks...

Terri-Ann chose a clean, classic design created by our all-star logo designer Edward Patton.

Once the color palette and logo were done, we worked with the sign vendor to create outdoor graphics. We also designed labels for use in the store and graphics that would end up on t-shirts and other stuff. Terri-Ann had great ideas for paint and furniture—she consulted us all along the way to be sure that everything matched from the umbrellas to the labels, signs and wall paint.

We had fun mixing and matching colors, stripes, and shapes to create a cohesive, branded look that started at the curb and went right up to the counter.

Legato Gelato now offers delicious handcrafted gelato and sorbetto at their brand new shop in Edgehill Village, Nashville.

Terri-Ann’s goal is to make the best gelato possible. To do this, she found that there are no shortcuts. Her gelato is made fresh daily. Each of her gelatos and sorbettos is made in small batches using fresh ingredients, including growth-hormone-free milk from Tennessee and, whenever possible, produce from local farmers.

In addition to Legato’s six signature flavors, the seasonal selection of gelato and sorbetto rotates daily and features traditional favorites like Pistachio and Chocolate Hazelnut alongside more adventurous creations like Pineapple Basil, Lavender with Nobel Springs Goat Cheese, and Peanut Butter and Preserves. Legato Gelato also offers a variety of homemade baked goods, frappes, affogatos (espresso over gelato), drinking chocolate and Italian sodas.