30 Lessons Learned from the Dogs I’ve Loved

Posted on May 4, 2017

That saying by Orhan Pamuk, you know the one: “Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.” I find it to be very true in my daily work and life with dogs (and cats, they speak too). But I find that a keen sense of observation is the best way to hear what they have to say.

This was the premise of a project we started a few years ago, Lessons from the Water Bowl. It started as a social media campaign, pairing our photography with a “lesson” I’d penned inspired by those animals we love. I arranged it in a fun way with different fonts and hand-lettering designed to accentuate the tone of the message and overlaid it on our photographs.
I shared it on our social media channels and that’s when I learned my first lesson in social media marketing:

Strike a chord with someone, pull at the right heart string with a positive message and a beautiful image, and you have yourself a recipe for sticky, shareable content.

Sticky, shareable content often leads to brand awareness and recognition. Good ideas spread like wildfire after all!

We went on to gather all our original lessons in sets of 12 and created three beautiful, printed calendars for three years in a row. Members of our following became devoted to them and often wrote in to ask if we were going to release a new one the next year.

But we stopped after year three, the cost of production and shipping, not to mention time invested in curating images, writing all original “lessons” and typographical layouts became a bit of a monster project, one that we were often short of funds to produce to our quality standards in an already busy market with similar projects, a great many of them for honorable, wonderful charities and good causes. We just couldn’t compete, and I confess it broke my heart. But you learn and move on in small business, so I shelved all our lessons and moved on to other passion projects.

Enter the Lessons from the Water Bowl overlay set

But today, we have unearthed them from the archives, added some of our most popular ones (yep! the one in honor of Senior Dog Month too) and have given them a new life: a set of 37 sweet overlays for you to use on your own projects, such as:

easily generate content for your social media channels
raise brand awareness and recognition
raise awareness about a cause you care about
tug at heartstrings in your presentations or written materials
add a little something extra to products you create for your portrait clients

May they bring that extra little something to your work and causes and do for you and your brand (or cause) what they did for ours: made our audience smile, remind them of the little things that matter, share and follow. They also gave us gave us evergreen shareable content and garnered visibility in a crowded market. Now we are making them available to you, for you to use in your own work, to share on social media or private client products.

Look at how one of our favorite dog brands Brindleberry Acres is putting the overlays to use on her Instagram!

The overlay set includes:
– Easy to use layered PSD file
– Ready to use dark gray and white transparent PNG files of each design
– Thank You/Read Me and License PDF
*please make sure and read through the MAY/MAY NOT section carefully before you purchase.