Dishdogz

Design can be like skating, some rides are flawless and smooth. Other are a bumpy, rough cobblestone ride. Some are a little bit of both. You can hit one side of the ramp with a righteous 780˚ twist only to crash and burn with a mouth full of hardwood on the other end. EPOS recently had the pleasure of working with Lionsgate Films on dvd packaging concepts for the movie Dishdogz. It was a project that challenged us to demonstrate a variety of design tricks. Here are the highlights of the ride taken by the EPOS design team.


Round 1: Learning to Skate:
Eric Martinez: I was initially given a variety of skateboard magazines and skate movie packages to follow for creative direction from the client. We were asked to focus on a skate inspired design that appealed to teenage boys. Digging in, I found that todays skate culture has one foot in a hand-made, do it yourself, photocopy art that is inspired by the vintage punk music scene. However, the other foot is in a sleek, ultra modern, streamlined design. Often times they are both at once. Here are the results.





Round 2: Limited Resources:
Brandon Fall: For my first round of comps, I was given direction to create a movie poster focusing on the actors in order of priority, while definitely keeping skateboarding as the background flavor. The photos we had to work with were more like snap shots, so the available photos were few. Color correcting, adding that background sky and harmonizing the colors were the keys to this first photo collage.




Kimiyo Nishio: Below is one of my comps from this round. The initial direction given us was to focus on the main characters in the movie, but it also has to have the cool, edgy skateboarding feel to attract the target audience. For this one though, I tried to bring the skater elements forward rather than the main characters.




Round 3: Direction Change:
Brandon Fall: After the previous round of comps, the client wanted to shift the direction again and make the skateboarding element the biggest priority. The “skater look” became the overriding theme and the actors took second stage in this comp.

Arden Kaywin Website Design

Concept Development:
Arden Kaywin is an independent artist who is at a transitional point of her music career. Feeling tied down in the safe harbor of pop music, Arden began to eye the "rocky" open waters. Creating a new rock-fueled body of work, and needing a new website to complete her modern-rock makeover, Arden hired EPOS designer, Kimiyo Nishio, to create the new look by taking a "water" concept, swirling it up, and allowing it to flow into a vibrant new website.




Why did you decide to use water as a theme for your website?
It just came to me as we were on the phone and I was looking at the photo in the tub. In the spirit of doing things organically and going with the flow, I thought why not just run with what had presented itself which happened to be water, instead of getting rid of the background and trying to force another idea onto it. Even though we took that photo on the fly, I think the fact that I’m in the tub surrounded by water is pretty fitting to where I am in my career and life now. I am fluid and changing, never static, trying new things. I like that water is clear but will take on the colors around it. I am sort of like that. I have different sides to me that come out when I’m inspired by different situations and people around me. Water cannot be contained; it will find a way to keep moving and flow towards its destination. I think my drive to create music has that quality to it as well.

There was a constant stream of communication between Arden and creative director, Gabrielle Raumberger, for developing a concept. Once the concept was set, our focus was to determine the feel of the website that represents Arden and differentiate her from other artists out there.

Design Development/Process:
For initial comps, EPOS designers, Brandon Fall and Kimiyo Nishio, worked together to set the look & feel of the homepage. With both designers working on the initial project, Arden was dazzled with the wide range of comps which were presented.





Design Refinement:
After multiple rounds of changes and further discussions with Arden, the homepage look was based upon a design created by Kimiyo. Design wise, the biggest challenge Kimiyo encountered was to find a happy medium point between the “water” theme and how Arden wanted to present herself, which is…a serious singer/songwriter with a risky rock edge, while maintaining her fun and feminine sides. “Water is almost the opposite from the edginess that Arden wanted, so depending on how I treated the water, it was hard to integrate the two opposite elements into one and still make it work in the viewers’ eyes” recalled Kimiyo.




Arden was a great client with great ideas. Together, Arden and the EPOS team worked closely to define clearly what she really wanted and what worked best for her in this new stage of her career.