Barking Pixel of Peterborough, Ont., recently collaborated with longtime partner The Media Works on a pylon sign for local company Nightingale. Images courtesy Barking Pixel
By Clinton Clarke
This is a short story—a microscopic look, perhaps—regarding how a small design firm works with sign companies. Our clients’ needs for design, branding, and marketing often cross paths with requiring creative and cost-effective signage solutions and, ultimately, final fabrication.
We are a married team of two running Barking Pixel Design, a boutique design communications studio in Peterborough, Ont. We prefer to work mainly with small to medium-sized businesses, but we treat our projects with big-brand mentality and methodology. We keep our clients’ goals and objectives at the forefront, creating original concepts for a wide variety of design and marketing challenges.
When we graduated from our graphic design programs—Kerry from Durham College in Oshawa, Ont., in 1999, and me from St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ont., in 1996—we had little idea of how involved we would become in signage design and its various applications more than 25 years later.
Below is a snapshot of how we have worked with some trusted sign companies over the years.
A boutique design communications studio, Barking Pixel was established by married partners Clinton Clarke and Kerry Brennan.
Building and maintaining industry relationships
After many years working in a digital and print environment, we started taking on full “rebrand” projects, which typically involve updating or developing a client’s logomark, website, and marketing collateral. As our business has grown, this package has evolved to include vehicle signage, wayfinding, and storefront/custom signage.
In the Peterborough and the Kawarthas region, about 100 km (62.1 mi) east of Toronto, there are a number of local sign companies. Many of our clients would often have existing relationships with signage suppliers who did work for them in the past, but when it came time to requiring new signage as part of their rebrand efforts, a number of the shops did not have the marketing or design experience to bring a proper creative vision to life. This is usually why a new client would reach out to us for help.
As a result, we have aligned ourselves with reliable suppliers to help us with fabrication, who understand our efforts and why the work we do as a graphic design company is so important to our clients’ marketing investments. These companies take pride in their craft, like to collaborate closely with designers, and offer some form of trade discount to compensate for project management and bringing them the work.
We have relied on a variety of shops over many years. All of them have individual capabilities and specialties to accomplish different types of fabrication.
For vehicle wraps and any kind of cut vinyl graphic, we almost exclusively work with AGL Graphics and Signs, who have been operating in Peterborough for more than 30 years. They produce great results that last, and we work hand-in-hand with them, providing client-approved, colour-accurate design proofs which they use as their guide for installs. We deliver resolution-ready, scaled production files (typically at 100 dots per inch [dpi]), which are then printed and installed by their graphics production team.
