Pulp Studios Inc. – A Short Retrospective

Pulp Studios Inc. has gone through some pretty mighty growth spurts in it’s short 2 and a half year lifespan. At least 2 shoe sizes in total, from baby shoes to size 12 (kids size – you parents have a frame of reference for that – the rest of you… have some babies…or go and peek at your friend’s babies shoes)

I personally don’t think I was prepared for the growth and positive change that has occurred as a result of our decision to step out and “start our own thing”. What a whirlwind its been that has swept us out of our comfort zones into the cockpit of a dynamic, busy, and special studio.

This blog post will provide you with some waxed discourse about the origins of Pulp from my perspective (Thanks to Kelly for fleshing out the details in this post – his mind is like a vortex for creative stuff) and some incite into the process which churned out our beloved logo and identity. Join me on an abbreviated journey through the collective creative mindscape of Kelly and I, buckle up, hold tight, keep both arms inside the vehicle at all times and don’t look down!!

Kelly and I had multiple brainstorming lunches during the early days and discussed a great many details about what we would want our company to be.

Very quickly we established that we wanted to build a studio – not just a business. Personally, this was a much easier concept for me to grasp as I was, at that time, running a freelance design business which was beginning to feel very shallow and one dimensional. At that time, the idea of starting a “business” just felt daunting, laborious and frankly scary. Framing the effort of starting something as a “studio” felt comfortable and achievable and more immediately rewarding.

Today, it’s obvious that we do indeed have a studio that has evolved into a business. Kelly and I have grown into the rolls of businessmen, blessed with this opportunity to impact the world around us with this challenging, creative, collaborative vessel called Pulp Studios Inc.

The learning curve has been steep as we’ve grown from the two of us to a team of 5 creatives, a project manager, a bookkeeper and numerous other collaborators we bring in as required to round out our team. (ie. programming and development, copy writing, audio creation and mastering). Please, don’t take all this lauding about our wonderful creation as bragging, I want to stress and impress upon you that where we are today is due in great measure to the opportunities provided to us by our esteemed clientele and collaborators. Without them… this paragraph would have been much shorter.

Moving on to the fun stuff.

During our early conversations we worked on establishing some values and core principles we wanted our studio to embody:

1. Quality
2. Current
3. Hip
4. Professional
5. Pleasant
6. Positive
7. Diverse
8. Flexible
9. Versatile
10. Ninjastic (it’s a real word..honest!)
11. Constant Growth (Creatively)

Currently we would add:

1. Craft
2. Honesty
3. Family
4. Professional
5. Dedicated
6. Reliable
7. Charitable

We also did a few web/brainstorming exercises to flesh out some symbolic and visual cues. Posted below is an example of one of those webs –

Keeping all these values and images in mind, we ruminated on a name for a number of days searching for one with meaning, power, passion and a lasting impression.

If you examine these sketches, you’ll see we were leaning on a few names that also started with the letter P. Pop, was a word that we both felt could work somehow…if it wasn’t so darn overused. Plus was also one that we though could work…perhaps in an abbreviated(hip?) PLS form. Our biggest reason for that was the big plus sign logo would have referenced old school video-game controllers and positive energy yay!

This early exploration left us with “Meanwhile” as the front runner. Below are some concepts we put together around the idea of the Meanwhile… text found in many comic books that implies something that’s happening while the action is elsewhere. Our main theme behind this was that we would be pursuing this company in the meantime to our daily efforts to keep our families fed, under shelter and fully clothed (for the most part).

Even in these early explorations you’ll see a lot of the visual cues that were important to include in our identity. Repetition of shapes, bringing to mind movement(animation!) or narrative(comics, children’s books, interactive!), and nostalgic(but clean!) type choices, referencing the golden age of illustration and design.

While Kelly and I were sure we were on the right path, our loving and dedicated wives felt otherwise. Kim expressed that the title, “Meanwhile,” was too passive and didn’t reflect the passion behind our work and the vision we had for the studio. Christy came to Kelly and reminded him “the name should have some umph..that meanwhile..although pretty to look at, as a word is soft…and doesn’t reflect the sense of dedication you both have towards your art.” Thankfully they care so much and aren’t afraid to give us specific and honest feedback.

Back at the thinking board, a moment of brilliance flashed across the dense creative ether which takes up residence in the grey matter of our beloved Kelly – “PULP”. He contacted me and I immediately loved the name. “Pulp” carries many layers which speak about our studio and our goals as creatives. At Pulp Studios Inc. we endeavour to imbue our creations with a narrative and use story telling to create pieces which speak to the target audience for each project. The Pulp era was a time when the groundwork was being laid for modern day genres in storytelling such as science fiction, fantasy, super heroes and adventure. To read more on Pulp Novels follow this link – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine Kelly and I were also excited about this name because we feel it references a time in recent creative history when craft was still a strong focus, illustrators were highly sought after in commercial work and an expert skill level in communicating through the illustrated image was a key component of many visual communication endeavours.

With a name firmly planted in our psyche what follows a flurry of concepts and brainstorming around this established pillar.

 

During much of our early conceptual work we were trying to include imagery which pulled from the themes in pulp magazines, ie. robots, rockets, shadow-like crime/drama heroes, lightning bolts etc. There was also a lot of imagery that had duality…dealing with the duality of working freelance and starting the studio, the duality of two partners, of work and home, of design and illustration, words and pictures. This came out in yin yang style spaceships, in multiple panels, and even some exploration of iconography with two figures. We also couldn’t help but show our love of Saul Bass in some of these sketches as well.

You can see in the above concepts that we were working with some themes that hearken to Dick Tracy, the Spirit or old time radio crime dramas. This is also where we began working with concepts that reference sequential art, graphic novels, film, storyboarding and animation.

During this process we began working with the idea of a “mascot” of sorts, a character that could be identified with the studio… this didn’t work out. it was too much to try and put into a logo. We looked at identities we liked and that were popular. What we noticed there was that a lot of them used a word-mark primarily and varied the imagery. Once we realized that the word-mark was stronger alone, and we could introduce iconography separately, it allowed Kelly and I to create our own individual avatars, and sparked the concept of each staff member creating their own avatar – you’ll see those after the logo seen below.

Utilizing the type face Futura (commercially released in 1936 and used extensively in the 50’s)  as a base for the letter forms…the pulp logo hearkens to those pulp covers and design from the 30’s-50’s. The slight perspective helps to give a sense of movement to the letters much like a simplified comic logo or the lovely logo for All Star Superman by Chip Kidd. We knew early on that the colours we’d be tapping for the logo were reds, whites, and some blacks and creams…these were pulled from the pulp covers and materials that have that stark pulp feel.

In the end we stripped the character art and arrived at the above logo design which is bold and memorable. It carries visual connotations and reference to the pulp magazine era and also feels contemporary in its strength and cleanliness. The identity also provided us the opportunity to include some fun storytelling artwork seen in our collector business cards and the home page of our website. It has become a studio right of passage for employees to create their own artwork to be displayed on their card. Below is our current roster of images which accompany our logo. Just for reader interest here is the list of who each piece relates to in the studio: top left –  Jaryn Shoemaker, top right – Corey Lansdell, bottom left – Kelly Mellings, bottom right – Meaghen Hicks.