#moosejaw

A couple weary travellers hitch a ride outside Moosejaw, Saskatchewan. Canada

Last week I began a new job as a full-time Graphic Designer at Moosejaw Mountaineering’s corporate office in Madison Heights, Michigan. I was very excited to take this step in my design career. Especially with a company with a notoriously odd and fun work culture. 

My first project on the Moosejaw brand was to promote a 48oz Moosejaw Nalgene water bottle product. The marketing team thought it would be funny to have the photographers photograph the water bottle with a footlong hotdog to emphasize the bottle’s size. With that photo taken, I knew this has to be a bit silly but it was difficult shifting into this “off-the-wall” design mindset that I surely was not used to. 

I initially played with the larger typography in Adobe Illustrator so I could get the sizing and tracking all concrete. I’m not a fan of editing type in Adobe Photoshop so I was more comfortable importing it from Illustrator. Due to the composition of the photograph provided, I didn’t have much flexibility in the placement of information. I was able to work with it despite this restriction. After showing the above image to one of the other designers, she made some really helpful suggestions like playing more with the background (which was really bland as is) and experiment more with the color of the typography. She suggested maybe pulling blue from the blue water bottle for some cohesiveness. 

From that feedback, I hopped in Illustrator and put together some icons for a pattern. I created a minimalistic hotdog and water bottle, tilted them on an angle, and repeated them in a sequence. I drew a clipping mask around the background/along the water bottles so I could implement this pattern in the gray background and also made the background a light blue to compliment the bottle. After that, I used the Moosejaw red color to accent a now white piece of typography. 

The last edit I made to this design was tilting the typography to contrast the direction of the tilt of the pattern in the background, making the overall composition a little more dynamic. 

There's lots of facts that needs to be clarified, and Weiye Su's excellent #documentary for @thenfb shows what's important regarding Moosejaw's underground tunnels, Chinese way of life and much more! #anthropology Read on at:

Now available to stream on TheNFB.ca Weiye Su is a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker with a goal, and that’s to dispel the myths concerning the underground tunnels that exist underneath the city of Moosejaw, Saskatchewan. What’s offered is a falsehood. After his family relocated here many years ago, what he wanted to discover about the past concerning fellow Chinese as this country was being built is…