The making of the Silver Lake Dog Park sign

Alexey writes:

—We have a task before us: to come up with signs for Los Angeles parks. Right now it’s total anarchy: dogs poop, cats poop and the owners don’t scoop (and maybe also poop). The new signs must put an end to all this.

Designer: Those guys in California don’t even know what real problems are. A real problem is when snow starts to melt in Moscow in spring, revealing layers of dog shit. Here is a fresh March layer. February right there. January now! And finally comes the December layer, meaning summer is just around the corner. All right, back to the sign. Clearly, it won’t help being a bore about scooping. We need something fun, something that would show we’re on the same team. Also, something local. Maybe related to California Gold Rush. A gold digger is happy to find treasure.

Art director: Nice. But we need more, and with no Wild West references.

OK. Everybody’s an angel in Los Angeles.

Art director: Wow, that’s good.

Starting to draw.

Art director: It didn’t come out well. The angel wields a fire rake and the cowboy holds the shovel unnaturally.

Art director: Too cartoonish and the anatomy is poor. I can’t imagine any of that in America.

Art director: And this looks like it’s from 1970s Poland. The style is an absolute miss.

Art director: Still no.

Art director: Maybe, take the skirt off the angel?

Art director: Flared sleeves don’t work. Also, pointing at the pile with a finger makes no sense.

Art director: The arm is about to fall off.

Art director: You keep improving bad ideas, that’s why the results are so poor.

Trying to drastically change the style and the contents.

Art director: Not good enough.

Art director: Too many icons in the sign, there are both the shovel and the heart.

We need to either replace the shovel with a scoop or change the belt.

Art director: The scoop, drawn sideways.

Art director: It has to be more horizontal. Otherwise it looks like he’s burying it.

A couple more iterations.

Sending to Hollywood.