How to Expand a Magical World.

Design > Product

I’ve said before that your packaging is as much the product as the product is. This is another example of how true that is. If you don’t know, Mysterio makes a baby t-shirt that can predict your child’s future. Kelly and I had just published a children’s picture book about Mysterio and we were looking to expand his product line. Mysterio was always more of a gift for parents than a gift for baby. Sure, the baby got a shirt. But the parents, the baby shower guests and the gift-giver, all got a fun, memorable experience. So why not develop more experiences for them

FINAL: BEHOLD! Mysterio’s Deluxe Keepsake Chest! An expansion of the Mysterio infant t-shirts that predict your baby’s future. It was so fun to play in this sandbox from a design and illustration standpoint. Almost too fun. In the end I made way too much stuff for it. Made it a little hard to explain all the contents!

That’s where Mysterio’s Keepsake Chest came from. It was a deluxe collection of Mysterio’s baby shirt, his book, two fun games, a wooden top, and a paper craft. Over the years, customer feedback told us that people really did keep Mysterio’s shirts once their baby’s grew out of them. How fun to see if the future would eventually come true! So one of the games we developed predicted more specific events – Milestones. At the bottom of the box lies the game board and a heavy card filled with milestones. Spin the top and name a milestone. When it stops, it will point to the age at which the child will reach that milestone. Write it down on the card. Easy! The fun part is discovering that your child’s first haircut will happen at 58 years of age. Yes, all silly, good fun at a baby shower. Flip the game board over, and you’ll find that Mysterio will answer any YES or NO questions you have. Again, ask the question, spin the top, get Mysterio’s answer.

FINAL: SEE?! TOO MUCH STUFF! The tag on the outside had a list of contents (as brief as I could make it), but it still read like a novella. The game board that’s flipping up? That’s two games on one board. Of course it comes with a one of Mysterio’s signature baby t-shirts and his new picture book.

FINAL: A close up look at the Ask-O-Meter! Think of it as a flat, paper, much sassier Magic 8-Ball. I’ve got one of these in our living room and we use it all the time to make YES or NO decisions for us. I like how a lot of the answers end up being sort of confusingly ambiguous/

FINAL: The flip side to the Ask-O-Meter is a fun way to record when your baby will meet their major development milestones. What’s so funny is how horribly wrong Mysterio’s predictions get. First Tooth could be at 51 years, for example. Hilarious.

FINAL: There’s even a little papercraft Mysterio that you can pop on a shelf to keep a mystical eye out for baby. I like the extra credit (which I always say is for chumps) of printing a back to the paper Mysterio complete with all the instructions reversed as well. And here’s a shot of me tying up a box to ship out. I’d do 100 of these at a go and it KILLED my fingers. The things you do for art.

I think my favorite part of the whole thing was the clever packaging. We stuffed the box with wood excelsior so it looked all wild and exotic. We even slid the lid closed to leave some of the curly fill sticking out because it looked so cool. And just like we did on his baby shirt packaging, we let the lid be pretty simple and straightforward. We used a paper tag to really detail all the info. But even the tag was cool because, as the gift-giver, you could clip off the contents part and be left with a nice gift tag to fill out. Then, the giftee could discover the contents on their own. Also, it looked WAY not-commercial that way, too. Oh, and to keep people from getting into the box in stores (I already learned they would try), I wrapped each one with heavy rope and fastened it tight with heavy black wire. It killed my hands (yes, I wrapped them all myself), but it was totally worth it.

When baby was too big for Mysterio things, the whole kit and kaboodle could be stored away in Mysterio’s handsome wooden chest. Someday, far in the future, the child would find it, and have a good chuckle.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

---

How to Make Fun of the Helpless.

Illustration > Safe Baby Handling Tips

Fun fact about my book, Safe Baby Handling Tips: That’s me and Kelly in all those drawings! We were living in SF and I was doing a rockabilly thing with vintage red tab Levis and no handlebar mustache. You can see Kelly go through a couple of hair styles between Safe Baby Handling Tips and its prequel follow-up, Safe Pregnancy Handling Tips. I’ve written about how we came up with the idea, but the intention of the drawings was to mimic instructions for power tools. Not airline emergency instructions. Not IKEA assembly instructions. There’s actually an important distinction here.

FINAL: The first edition of the book in question – Safe Baby Handling Tips circa 2005. Look at that handsome rockabilly devil, will ya?

FINAL: Like painters in all the cartoons who paint live models, illustrators use photos for reference.. We call it “scrap”. Before computers, I knew illustrators who had rooms full of file cabinets packed with torn out magazine pages, photos, all kinds of scrap (see!?) paper with stuff they could reference in their work. I like this photo because of the baby laying on the ground behind me. Looks like I totally missed!

FINAL: A couple of my favorite panels. It takes people a while to see what’s so wrong about Shopping with Baby, which is fun to watch. Drying Baby is so moronic and mean it never fails to crack me up. Same with the Lifting Baby detail (what a grip!). Oh, and a little something from Nursing Baby to keep you up at night. Yep, that’s me. I’ll spare you the scrap I shot for it.

FINAL: Another true life adventure in scrap shooting (courtesy of Bonding with Baby). And two of my favorite Kelly panels. She cut her hair short in the middle of the project and I kept it accurate. So when you read through the book you can tell what was done first and what was done later. Don’t ask me why all our furniture was labeled.

My dad and my granddad always taught me that you have to respect your tools. You understand their power and never forget that you need to be mindful when using them. Let your mind wander, and bad things can happen. That’s what I thought about when we had our baby. As long as you stay mindful and not be a moron, no one will get hurt. It’s a weird twist, but you follow me, right?

If you read about the strategy behind Safe Baby Handling Tips, you know I didn’t have a lot of time to mess around drawing these. They’re simple, but they had to be realistic enough to need scrap for me to work from. Because what I’d do if I had time is take photos of people recreating the actions and then draw from that. I did that, but then traced the images in a stylistic way so I could scan them, clean them up in Photoshop, turn into vectors in Illustrator, and then pop them into frames fast. The stuff I couldn’t shoot, I just drew freehand which turned out to be pretty efficient.

COMPS: of course there were a lot of ideas that didn’t make the book for one reason of another. When we did the 10th Anniversary update/expansion we had to nix some panels because technology made them obsolete. They just don’t make TVs like that anymore and we didn’t feel like a flat panel would be as funny. And somethings our editor at Running Press nixed to save us from ourselves. Co-Sleeping is too scary and real a problem, for example. And even though we have a booze related panel (Calming Baby) it was not recommended where this one we flipped it to be the YES. Bad. And I added some that were just shitty for fun. That’s a string of firecrackers I’m lighting over there for the unpublished, Teaching Baby to Crawl.

FINAL: New directions for Safe Baby Handling Tips. Clockwise from top left: 1. If dogs are the new children, a Safe Dog Handling Tip series seemed appropriate. 2. We played with the idea of offering our Handling Tips on adult apparel, canvas totes, and even pillowcases, so we made some useful usage tips for those fine products. 3. I picked something at random to see if the formula would hold up. HI-YA! It did. 4. This was the big NO on how to use a SBHT coffee mug.

I later tried my hand at expanding the Handling Tips concept to other things to see if the idea had legs. Karate, Dog Ownership, that kind of stuff. I think the baby is the best foil just because of the original power tool reference. For some gross reason it’s funniest when the person who could get so seriously hurt is the small helpless person who least deserves it.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

---

How to Not Destroy a Baby.

Strategy > Safe Baby Handling Tips

Are you a parent? Let me tell you, it’s terrifying. Scary at the least. If you are one, you know what I’m talking about. You’re so nervous and excited and, well, clueless. Because if it’s your first, you have no real idea what you’ve gotten yourselves into. And that’s a fact that becomes more and more clear as you careen toward your due date. When Kelly and I were expecting, I was just scared. She was terrified.

FINAL: The cover of the expanded version of Safe Baby Handling Tips. On the cover is a miniature, simplified version of another product I designed for Wrybaby – The Wheel of Responsibility.

When I was 14, my parents decided they missed being parents (of really small, helpless people). So, they had my brother Josh. Then my sister, Lindsey, three years later. So being in middle school through high school with a couple of babies in the house would prove really helpful to me as a soon-to-be-dad. I knew how to feed and burp a baby, change diapers, and all that jazz. Meh, just like ridin’ a bike. I was in no way emotionally prepared (and who is the first time) for the shock of full time responsibility, but at least I had some exposure in the field. Kelly had none.

We did all the things you do as expecting parents. We read scary articles online, we bought books that were thick and boring, or thick and scary. We were the first of our hipster advertising friends to have a baby, so they were, hilariously, no help at all. We went to baby care classes, and to the requisite Lamaz classes. And finally, our hands about all wrung out, Kelly went into labor and everything changed. 

 Sorry, changed for the better, I mean. Kelly and I soon discovered a few important truths.

1. Across the span of human history, all new new parents feel the same

2. Caring for a baby is difficult, but it’s manageable and only gets easier with time

3. You’ve got to be a fucking moron to really mess this up

REVIEWS: Our Amazon reviews are hilariously amazeballs.

TRUE: The only foreign translation of Safe Baby Handling Tips – German. Take a look at that title on the cover! Hahahaha. Do I have to tell you I had nothing to do with the layout? So bad!

That last point, especially. That’s where Safe Baby Handling Tips came from. Look, as long as your intentions are good, and you’re a somewhat stable person, you really aren’t going to mess this up. At least not in the beginning. Oh, you’ve got all the time in the world to unintentionally destroy your child emotionally. But in the first year? Nah. You good.

We’d conceived (see what I did there) the concept of these “handling tips” about a week after bringing our new son home. Each illustrated tip was printed on a newborn item: a onesie (Playing with Baby); a hooded towel (Drying Baby); a diaper cover (Checking Baby’s Diaper); you get the idea. It’s very simple. Each scenario shows you a common parenting activity and what kind an absolute idiot you’d have to be to mess it up. Sort of gives you some perspective, no?

Anyhoo, we were in Wrybaby’s booth at the New York International Trade Fair when a couple of reps from Running Press strolled in. They asked me if I had any more of these tips to fill a book. “Of course!”, I said. I didn’t. But I sure did a week later when we sent them the packet of illustrations that would eventually become Safe Baby Handling Tips.

To date, Safe Baby Handling Tips has sold over 120,000 copies. It is also well reviewed on Amazon. The book has been translated into German because if anyone knows anything about comedy, it’s the Germans. And the illustrations have become an stubbornly enduring meme on the internets much to our pleasure and dismay.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

---

How to Make an Efficient, Effective First Impression.

Design > Website

Web design is a discipline that I can’t say is a focus of mine. BUT! And this is, as the kids say, a big but – I can do it, and do it pretty well. Case in point, the project I did to rebrand American Greeting Properties (AGP). They had confidence problems and we “re-skinned” them to fix it. The backbone of that effort was their website. Look, a website is all about organization and the hierarchy of information. For AGP they needed their homepage to be a gateway to a world of creativity. Their objective wasn’t to collect leads, sell product, or even a service. It just had to inform and make a desired impression. Not to downplay this, there was a LOT of impression to change, in the process. The website also had to tie together a lot of disparate assets and present them under a unified umbrella. So, not easy.

FINAL: The home page for American Greetings Properties.

FINAL: Clicking an area of the map (or in the legend) would bring a pop-up of everything you needed to know about each property.

FINAL: I’d designed and illustrated all the infographics for each properties detail page. This was a ton of work, but also a ton of fun.

FINAL: Here’s what clicking ABOUT US would bring you.

FINAL: How mobile would work along with a little secondary navigation idea that didn’t make it. Once the island drawing was finalized, I made a topographical rendering of it complete with a handy chart of who lived at what elevations. Hahaha.

I worked with an internal team who included a developer, so whatever I designed was sure to be actually possible to create. I’m a realist and won’t work under any other circumstances. Who wants to do a bunch of work and have it be impossible to implement? So we all decided on a simple structure. A home page base would present the entire site map (see what I did there?). Clicking a character would bring up a light box panel of information that would deliver everything (plus infographics) they needed to know. We created a format where a LOT of information could be conveyed in the most condensed form possible, without making anyone want to kill themselves. Easy.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

---

How to Make the Complicated Simple.

Design > Brochures

Every client is different, and every marketing problem is different. But sometimes (although rarely) you don’t have to reinvent the wheel all over again. If something works, heck, keep it! I already had a brochure-making system that worked and I already made a bookshure (I really need a better name) for VersaMe’s Starling Partners program. It was a cool idea that worked great, so we kept all the physical formatting (same size, dimensions, heavy cover and nice page weight) for the next project. Besides, if you have to do multiple brochures for a company, you might as well build a library that looks uniform and tight when they’re all together.

FINAL: The name and logo I created for VersaMe’s platform came directly from how it worked. Also, Spoke’s not a bad name for a company that’s all about verbal communication, right?

The Starling was VersaMe’s early-education wearable. You can read all the deets here, but in short, The Starling was based on a super advanced platform that VersaMe created called Spoke ( I named it that based on the eventual infographics). The Starling logged data about an infant’s early-developmental progress and sent it to Spoke. Spoke would process that data and send it (along with recommended action items) to the parent and any parent-approved care givers. For consumers, the data usually just went to parents, grandparents or a nanny. But if parents wanted, they might also include their pediatrician. If an infant is a little short on direct verbal communication, their parents and the pediatrician would recognize that and, at the regular visit, they could figure out ways to improve that outcome together. Think of it like an educational thermometer that parents could share with their pediatrician.

Anyway, that’s it’s simplest version of how VersaMe’s Spoke platform works. Spoke was developed to sustain the maximum amount of early development team building. Unlike so many of today’s algorithms, this one wasn’t built to exploit user data to deliver relevant advertising. Spoke was built to deliver relevant, actionable educational opportunities to a team of caregivers in the development network the parents created, in order to meet their child’s specific needs. Cool, right? And that’s what this brochure had to explain to an audience that wouldn’t want to get into the coding weeds about exactly how that was even possible. Investors, partners, etc. just wanted to know the basics of how Spoke worked and what its potential was. 

And I made up everything you just read. Sort of. Mostly. Look, although Spoke’s functionality was clear for the founders and developers (so they could build it), no one ever really defined it in a way regular people would understand. Even though I’d made a name for myself making complex stuff simple, I was lucky to have the capable help of VersaMe’s Product Manager, Susan Tahir. Together we defined, named, branded, iconically mapped, invented creative uses for, and I can safely say, improved the complicated process that made this Spoke so valuable.

So for the brochure (and this didn’t have to be a brochook): same company; different audience; different product; slightly different look. This had to convey all the existing brand attributes, but send a different message – we were confident, smart, sophisticated, and had created a (truly) amazing platform.

INFOGRAPHICS: I really enjoyed designing the graphics showing how Spoke worked for different users. It’s was crazy complicated and I got it boiled down to an easy-to-follow, step by step guide.

I kept with my favorite system of solving one problem per spread, but this was so targeted, that I didn’t need to go overboard on the eye-candy and repetition. Here’s how this one broke down:

Cover: Sexy and High-Tech.

Spread 1: What we’re doing is a big fucking deal

Spread 2: Look, here’s why it’s amazing for everyone...

Spread 3: ...and here’s how it changes everything

Spread 4: Here’s exactly how it could be used to do this...

Spread 5: ...and this

Spread 6: You’re already behind in this emerging, proven technology

And we’re out. If you’ve seen the other VersaMe stuffs I did (the Partner Brochure, or the videos, or even the packaging) this a similar example of taking existing materials and jerking the message into new territory without having to recreate everything.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

---