CLIENT FEATURE: Sensorial Design Brings Happy Dog Mom to Life
“If they won’t read it, show them what you are about.”
This is something we say to clients often. It’s just too easy to forget. Supportive design elements such as icons, spot illustrations and infographics are great branding tools that can help further your message and add a friendly, approachable tone to your marketing.
Here’s how we had the pleasure of bringing this to life with Happy Dog Mom.
Illustration for Happy Dog Mom–Drawing the heart of a brand
Jennifer Waters is a woman of many roles. Though she wears them all proudly, a mom to amazing kids, and a skilled writer and photographer, but there’s one role that’s near and dear to her heart– being a Dog Mom.
When Jenn was building Happy Dog Mom. from scratch, she reached out to me to help her add a “human touch” to her branding. Her new website was clean and organized, the color palette and fonts were warm and inviting and she had no shortage of beautiful photography. According to Jenn, however, there was something missing, a little softness perhaps, to complement the modern and clean aesthetic.
The goal was to represent a diverse group of women and their dogs. Together, we opted for a hand-drawn illustration style, the texture of which would help add that human touch Jenn wanted and would add to Happy Dog Mom’s. sensorial marketing.
Scuse’ me, sensorial what now?
Sensorial marketing, graphic design in this case, is simply commercial art that can be experienced deeply, via our senses. It goes beyond pen and paper and connects on a different level with your target audience.
Want to know more about this stuff? We go into nerdy detail about it in the following link and give you some tips on how to start applying it to your brand marketing. Check out our post on sensorial marketing.
Back to Happy Dog Mom…
Jenn wanted to connect with women of all walks of life who have something in common: a life made better by a beloved dog. For this reason, HDM’s presence needed to be a welcoming space. We needed our illustrations to feel soft, flowy and whimsical without becoming cheesy.
Illustrating a life in full color
Something I loved about working with Jenn was our easy collaboration. Her art direction was simple. She gave me a list of ideas for women and types of dogs she wanted illustrated and descriptive words I could lean on when putting pencil to paper. I appreciated her trust in my vision, and it was this trust that allowed me to take an idea for how to take this project to the next level and run with it.
Bouncing off an idea I had while looking at Jenn’s brand mood board, I reached out to my friend Amy Soper, an alcohol ink artist. I asked her to create a custom piece with HDM’s color palette. Amy’s piece fit the brand perfectly. It was warm and flowy. Once applied to my illustrations, everything suddenly came to life.
The softness of the illustration style, paired with the emotional and psychological effects of color, works to bring these two pieces together in a beautiful and unique way.
“You know when you hire a designer and you secretly want them to hit it out of the park on the first try? You expect a few rounds and some compromise, but what you really want is for them to come back with an idea that shows they both read your mind and came up with something even better than you could have imagined. Well, that’s the exact experience that The Labs & Co. delivered. On the first try, Nat not only gave me a way better version of what I was thinking in my head, she also made it more meaningful by collaborating with an artist who she knew I had a personal connection with. I didn’t change a single thing. Her illustrations captured my brand perfectly. And the personal connection took the brand story even deeper.”
– Jennifer Waters, Happy Dog Mom
Does your brand marketing need that extra something? We can help. This is kind of our jam after all.
