Honoring Industry Traditions While Modernizing a Brand
Age-old, niche industries often have traditions that are challenging in the digital space.
In 2023, I joined the board of the New Guinea Singing Dog Club of America to help them rebrand and refine their communication strategy.
I never intended on kennel clubs or dog rescues being part of my rebranding work, but it’s a thing I do now. And it actually makes sense. Kennel clubs and smaller dog rescues have branding that is not suited for the digital age. I don’t mean that it’s out of style, which yes, it often is, but the core problem is that these organizations hold really tight to traditions that existed before the internet.
Take for example, the round logo.
Round logos are the standard in the kennel club world. There’s a formula that clubs typically follow: Outside circle > club name > inside circle > drawing of dog breed or an abbreviation of the club name.
I know Canva has a lot of people thinking that there’s nothing wrong with this. While round logos are not inherently bad, they are if they have text. A logo needs to be readable or discernible from multiple resolutions. In a rounded format, text will always become smushed and unreadable.
One of the original concerns for kennel clubs obviously wasn’t website accessibility. It was fitting your logo on an award ribbon. That still matters to clubs. So, I knew that we had to have a round version of the logo that fit with industry traditions.
Shape wasn’t the only problem the logo had. The initial logo, lovingly drawn by a board member looked dated. Again, that was the vibe they were going for. It fit quite well with traditions. It looked like the logo of a kennel club that had been around for decades, rather than a couple of years.
But, fitting in with traditions is not one of the goals of the New Guinea Singing Dog Club of America. Their slogan is “living modern lives with the world’s most ancient dog.” Dog shows are still the realm of Boomers and older Gen-X. That’s not who NGSDCA wants to court. Gen-X, sure, but also Millennials with eye toward tne Gen Z dog owners of the future.
Plus, the board itself is full of vibrant opinionated women - and these dogs, well, these dogs are vibrant and opinionated, too. That’s nowhere in the original logo.
Point 1 for finding a brand identity
I always consider the people at the brand, even before I consider their demographics
A lot of my job is paying attention. I hang around, observe, and gather information. Good branding reflects and embraces an entire team. So, I was paying attention to the strengths of each board member. I noticed something - we had a brilliant artist on our board. Her designs were shared on her private facebook. I don’t have permission to share them here, but she creates beautiful digital cubist-type artwork.
Everything about her work captured the vivaciousness and soulfulness of Singing Dogs. Plus, she used vibrant colors in her work, which reflected the dogs’ origins in Papua New Guinea.
I drew up a quick branding proposal and presented it to the rest of the team. Within a week, we had this stunning logo:
The words “New Guinea Singing Dog Club of America” are on the outer circle of a around image. The inner image is of a multicolored dog drawn out of varying shapes.
We had a few conversations about how the dog should look. We wanted a warm yellow, plus black and cream, to reflect the coat colors of NGSDs. We also wanted to highlight the breed standard, not just in the shape of the head and face, but also in the personality. This is a joyful dog with a bit of mischief in his eyes.
For website purposes, merchandise, and other branded items, we came up with the landscape version of the logo.
While the artist was designing the logo, I was refining the color palette.
One thing, as a board, we all agreed on was that we wanted to honor the people of Papua New Guinea. We did not want to be literal about with our brand colors. The artist, Joan, wove nods to PNG into the logo, with the red on the cheek and the strip of green on the bottom of the dog’s neck.
As I said before, PNG is a lush and vibrant place. The original color palette was not that.
There is nothing wrong with these colors: A stormy blue-grey, a goldenrod yellow-orange, and dark brown rounded out with black.
They’re fine. They’re okay.
But they don’t tell us anything.
A color palette should tell a story. If this one does say anything, it’s very serious. Not at all what the board wanted to convey.
Understanding that we’d already broken quite a few kennel club branding traditions just with the design of the dog (I know that might seem odd to those of you not in dogworld), I decided to keep some of the colors within current trends. Orange/yellow and bright blue are very popular in the canine-marketing industry. This is true for products, animal welfare organizations, and kennel clubs. I used those as the base colors. The unexpected colors in the rest of the palette will keep them fresh.
I went with a deep ocean blue, almost black but not quite, for the dark accent. Then a beautiful smokey grey that has a tinge of lavender to it for the light accent. Red would be expected here for the bold accent, which is exactly why I didn’t do it.
It’s 2024. We’re using bright pink.
This palette’s story is vivacious and fresh, but still has depth.
This is one of my proudest rebrandings. Working with the NGSDCA team was so rewarding. You can visit their site to learn more about the ancient Singing Dog.
