InDesigner: Modern Dog

To call Modern Dog a poster child for Adobe InDesign might be a stretch, but given the design firm’s early adoption of the software and the cutting- edge posters it’s created with InDesign, the phrase isn’t that far off base. Modern Dog was founded by Robynne Raye and Michael Strassburger in Seattle in 1987. The duo’s early poster work for musical gigs and theatrical productions helped establish the company’s reputation for funky design with a cheeky attitude; for instance, a cartoon hand with its middle finger extended poking out of the famed Warner Brothers logo. Some posters have borrowed from campy vintage photos and 1950s-style advertising, while others evoke the strong graphic shapes and colors of 1960s movie posters. So renowned are these posters that they’re included in museum collections all over the world. Their posters have also been published as Modern Dog: 20 Years of Poster Art.

But while its poster work may have garnered Modern Dog early fame, the company produces designs for a wide variety of projects and clients. For every tongue-in-cheek Mega-Mullets Magnets or Cat Butt Air Freshener (created for online retailer Blue Q), there is an ecological awareness logo for the Seattle Aquarium or a map of Seattle highlighting community-initiated installations around the city.

Modern Dog can work both sides of the aisle because of its track record for satisfying the client. “We’re known for our

more fun work because people enjoy seeing that stuff, but we always work to what is most appropriate—fun or straight,” Raye says. “We don’t feel like we have a ‘style.’ We just do what works for the client.” Modern Dog’s client roster has included such blue-chip companies as HBO, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nordstrom, and Nike. Today Disney and HarperCollins are part of the client mix.

At the emotional heart of these disparate projects is what Raye describes as “bold, imaginative, and playful design.” At the technical core is InDesign and its sibling applications Photoshop and Illustrator.

“We use all three applications every day and almost all projects are created using two or more of them,” Raye says, adding that all four designers at Modern Dog have considerable expertise in the three applications. “InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator have their own strengths and we always work to build good, efficient files for production. That plays a part in our decision as to which programs we use for different tasks.”

Developing error-free files is critical. Most of Modern Dog’s projects are destined for print output, although the company—especially Strassburger—has been developing Web sites and experimenting with motion and animation. But with print at center stage, it’s not surprising that InDesign’s output features play an essential role. “We could not live without the preflight and package function,” Raye says.

Even with illustration- and image-intensive designs, such as CD packaging for Shout! Factory, InDesign plays a part. “For the Shout! covers, we usually start by creating comps in Illustrator and Photoshop, but the final production files always end up in InDesign,” Raye says.

With multi-page projects such as books and catalogs, Modern Dog designers begin by dumping all text and images on the appropriate pages. Layout is not important initially. Raye says that they’ll even let text boxes run long. “We need to make sure that what needs to be in the document is placed on the page,” she explains.

Next, frames, both text and graphics, are organized into a grid system along margin, column, and alignment guidelines, then applied to master pages. The third phase drills down into typographic choices, which include assembling the style sheets that Raye deems “indispensable.” Strassburger adds, “Clients tend to change and add things during the design process, so using styles makes it much easier to re-fit complicated copy blocks.”

“We choose a page—usually the first—and start figuring out fonts, weights, leading, spacing, justification, and so on,” Raye says. “Once we have something that looks good we create paragraph styles based on what we’ve done, then we apply the paragraph styles throughout the entire document and see how things fall.”

Paragraph styles serve as Modern Dog’s main method for styling text. “We primarily stick with paragraph styles, although we do use character styles when we’re working on music packaging because there’s always a page with song credits that has many different things going on typographically,” Strassburger says. To make adjustments even easier, the design team has mastered paragraph styles’ Based On attribute.

Once initial styles are applied, the designers fine-tune them in context of the entire document. “Finally,” Raye says, “we go through the pages to make custom adjustments until everything is perfect.”

While Modern Dog works hard to please all their clients, two recent projects needed to satisfy the designers’ toughest critics: themselves. Both Raye and Strassburger recently wrote and designed two books: My Favorite Shoes: True Stories from around the World, by Raye; and Oh Crap! I’m Having a Baby, by Strassburger with his wife Anna McAllister, both published by Blue Q. Neither found the process of writing and designing their own books particularly stressful, but there are drawbacks. “Most people don’t get rich off designing and writing books,” Strassburger says. “The pay is considerably lower than most other design projects. That aside, it was actually quite fun.”

Modern Dog’s less-conventional projects could prove to be a welcome distraction in the current economy. “Many of our clients—such as Blue Q and the Seattle Aquarium—supply a diversion that people enjoy during hard times, so that kind of work typically survives times like these,” Raye says. “Being a company of four people also makes us more attractive to clients that don’t have large budgets to hire bigger firms.” The company has made some adjustments to survive the downturn, such as starting a monthly email newsletter that highlights current work. Feedback on the newsletter has been positive, and it’s even pulled in some new jobs. For the past couple of years, Modern Dog has been working on a project that might be considered a showcase for all that the designers hold dear: good design, strong branding, fun illustration, innovative packaging, irreverent attitude, social responsibility—and dogs. Austin-based Olive sells environmentally friendly products for dogs. The designers at Modern Dog have been working with the company from the ground up, designing its brand identity, marketing materials, and product packaging. While the catalog itself boasts a clean design that draws attention to the products, the product design, with its happy mutt logo to its jaunty lowercase type, feels like classic Modern Dog. The two-year collaboration seems like a perfect match—in fact, Olive’s tagline is “Green Goods for Modern Dogs.” With four dogs wandering through Modern Dog’s offices, the designers have plenty of inspiration for Olive’s catalogs and collateral. In fact, both of Raye’s dogs and a pooch belonging to another Modern Dog designer have appeared in the Olive catalog. Given these canine connections, it’s tempting to think that the Modern Dog name has a hidden subtext, like characteristics of intelligence, loyalty, and sociability, or the ability to hunt down jobs and to bond as a pack. Those characteristics may be true, but that’s not the meaning of the company’s name. Its origin stems from a passing comment by Strassburger to Raye while driving by a dog-grooming storefront. They liked how the phrase sounded, and it stuck—another spontaneous leap of imagination that has become a hallmark of Modern Dog.