Originate brand name | MagentaDot Brands

Surface Active Artwear Teespring store pops-up

April 16, 2020 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

April 2020
Dear Surface Dweller,

We’re excited to announce our fab Surface Active TeeSpring store has popped up! Our Surface Active Artwear celebrates some of the beautiful assets of New Zealand. Please pause & peruse our first two designs over at Teespring—Adelie penguins and Tuatara.

Adelie penguins, Antarctica

from Surface Active

Noisy, stinky & aggressive in reality but ain’t they cute? This design is a chuckle with penguins coming & going on the front and back. By the magic of art the white cotton of a plain teeshirt is transformed into Antarctic sea ice so this design is available on white only.

This crazy design is printed both front…

and back.

This imagery tells a tale of a dramatic before and after scene that unfolded when this formation of hungry Adelie penguins hesitated near the edge of the Antarctic sea ice, then they were suddenly faced with a leopard seal on the prowl in the waters just below.

This Adelie penguin all-over print, is available here for AUD$53.12

Credits

Design firm: Surface Active
Art direction: Design pARTners, Chrissie Terpstra and Shaun Waugh
Client: Surface Active
Designer, illustrator, desktop publishing: Shaun Waugh

©magentadot brands

Surface Active: Making waves in a sea of sameness

August 8, 2019 / magentadotbrands.com / 4 Comments

T-shirts in the spirit of fun.

Surface Active T-shirts main neck label.

As an illustrative graphic designer, writer, desktop publisher; I was a design pARTner with Chrissie Terpstra in our in-house garment screenprinting studio. We learned that hand-pulled screenprinting is the medium of the hard labouring graphic artist.

Overview

Of course we were big fans of the humble T-shirt and by the mid 1980s they had become hot promotional items, garments on the outskirts of fashion, and a relatively new medium for the Graphic Designer’s art. What had for a long time been considered a poor medium for Graphic Design grew to an almost essential one.

All you have to do is walk down the street anywhere in the world since the early 80s to see what a ubiquitous promotional vehicle they have become. If you mail out 100 potential clients a direct mail brochure perhaps 200 people will see it. But mail out, or better yet, sell 100 T-shirts, and assuming they’re at all decent looking, you launch 100 walking billboards.
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Lip Service: launch brochure & ‘leave behind’ promo poster

July 9, 2018 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

The A5 bifold brochures and Escape from the Straitjacket of the Mind promotional poster were produced to launch John Davey’s refreshing & inspirational new approach to delivering a corporate message at conferences or training seminars—“Lip Service”.
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Waitui single malt: name, logo & packaging

July 8, 2018 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Waitui, a Small Batch, Single Malt, Manuka Honey, Golden Bay Whiskey, a unique New Zealand made prestige product, one of the few true ‘Honey whiskies’ made in the world today—in Takaka, Golden Bay.

Waitui, previously named ‘Bush Whiskey’ required renaming, rebranding and packaging to a standard that properly reflects the product. The result of the rebrand and repackaging has been outstanding at achieving the client’s goals; greatly increasing sales volume, profitability, and enabling the product to be distributed to prestige Whisky specialist retailers such as Whiskey Galore in Christchurch.
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Silver Cloud 100% agave spirit launch event

July 7, 2018 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Silver Cloud product launch even invitation.

A documentary photo essay that I shot of the fabulous Silver Cloud 100% Pure Agave liquor launch event at Nicola’s Cantina in Nelson New Zealand.

The feature of the launch event was the auction by Terry Knight of only the first two of the thirty bottle limited release, bottles number 30 and 29, which sold on the night for a tidy NZD$400 and $450 respectively, a fitting testament to the quality of the pure agave liquor, the packaging, the branding and the success of the well promoted and event managed launch of event.
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Absolute-Proof digital proofing launch website 1998

July 7, 2018 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Absolute-Proof | Digital Proofing Resolved | The 1998 product, website and brand launch

Best-in-class colour-managed workflow hub / digital proofing software solution, brainchild of brilliant friend pre-press professional Hjórtur Kristínsson, named by me ‘Absolute-Proof ’, launched in 1998, this was the first iteration of the web design I designed for the product launch. The launch was aligned with Hugo showing at the Drupa print fair in Dusseldorf that year. The AbsoluteProof website was developed in collaboration with a web design firm in Reykjavik, Iceland.
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Top Marks: top 40 logos

July 7, 2018 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

The power of visual communication is the ability to…

Talk less.

Although I’ve worked on many high-profile projects, I strive to give equal attention to the more commonplace assignments and small business clients. This is the small things that need to be precise—the directional signs, capabilities brochures, websites, product packaging, corporate collateral, After almost 40 years of practice, I am still excited by that challenge and the possibilities each new project presents.
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Brand use guide: WindsorUrban

June 20, 2017 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Setting brand standards that people will follow

The brand use manual or corporate identity guide ensures the new WindsorUrban logo is applied correctly in every application where WindsorUrban is identified. The purpose of the brand manual is to enable and regulate a uniformity in the firm’s visual image. WindsorUrban aims to design and manufacture the “go to” product and service offering within their market niche, the brand that their customers think of first when they want urban furniture and street lighting. The guide’s basic job is to teach everyone who uses it, what the brand is and how to effectively implement it.
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Windsor Heritage gets a brand makeover

June 14, 2017 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Windsor Heritage got a logo that casts them…

In a fresh new light, with a new attitude

This is the deliberate process I followed to give them a new look

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Word template for WindsorUrban

May 18, 2017 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

A user-friendly and attractive quotation template

The chief benefit of the WindsorUrban rebrand is that the company’s vision and personality across traditional and interactive media now has the same voice. The new brand accurately reflects the company’s personality and supports the sales and marketing team. A well-written and perfectly formatted Microsoft Word quote document that’s high on readability and clearly laid out information makes the job of responding quickly to client requests, and of presenting a professional image, a lot easier for the sales staff.
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Pionair: Oceania “Affluent Travel” kit

May 17, 2017 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Unparalleled Journey’s “Affluent Travel” toolkit… the essentials.

Aside from being a private air charter firm, owning aircraft and having air crew and air operations personnel on staff, Pionair was also a “best-in-class” inbound wholesale travel operator to the world’s finest destinations in the Oceania region.

The Pionair travel department had a group focussed on designing, marketing and operating escorted group air tours and a Free Inboard Travel, Unparalleled Journeys (UPJ) “affluent travel” group whose clientele was high-end travel agents in the U.S. and internationally.
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Waitui product launch proposal

December 7, 2014 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Introduction

The product launch of the MagentaDot Brands renamed, rebranded and repackaged “Waitui Single Malt 6 year aged” is a critical time in the early stage of introducing this New Zealand Manuka Honey Small Batch Whiskey to the domestic and international liquor markets. Kiwi Spirit distillery is a small company so to create a big launch takes careful planning and sufficient lead time to organize all the contributing components. This is a company with small budgets and limited resources so there is a need to get as much value out of the budget and resources as possible.
Keep on reading!