My Medici, Part IV: Is this the end?

Little-known fact: The tail of an evolving pink dog will eventually curl downward as it reaches the zenith
of evolutionary development. A wrap-around for a promotional coffee

Over several happy years, Greg Archer posed many promotional problems for me to help solve when he owned The Rest Stop, a Sacramento bicycle accessories store.

He still poses fun problems as owner of Archer Bicycle Repair.

In addition to  promotional postcards, a bicycling cap and racing jerseys, Archer dreamed up a bunch of ads and promotional possibilities. Here are some of the rest.

"Nothing compares with the simple pleasure of a bike ride," said John F. Kennedy, in the barely legible type along
the crest of the hill. Why did he say it? I don't know. It's not world peace or nuclear winter, but it works here.
For a mug that didn't get made.

"I've got an idea," Greg would say over the phone, and a new adventure would commence, usually starring the pink dog.

Greg was building the identity of the store he inherited when he bought it, and establish it as the go-to source for, as he said it, everything for bicyclists but the bike. It was serious business run unseriously; customers could count on staffers' time for answers or just some tangentially bike-related conversation.

The list of ideas exceeded Greg's ability to produce it. Coffee mugs and a water bottle hit the shelves next to the jerseys and cap.

Ads frequented the neighborhood publications.

A new fiery pink sign even hung above the store door.

But the official flags never flew. And the beers remain unbrewed. Pity.

Rest Stop Bohemian is my favorite … this is a spec sheet for Greg Archer, with internal notes.

Made into an embossing stamp (below), it validated The Rest Stop gift buck.
In what I'm sure is the worst Latin translation possible, it says, "My dog ate it."

My Medici, Part III: Jersey Shore

A Harley Quinn-inspired jersey, never produced; I'm sad.

Greg Archer's ideas and passion outlasted his brick-and-mortar bike accessories store, The Rest Stop. As a result, not all of the products which he asked me to design and illustrate for the store ever saw daylight, unless you count my Web site.

So it's show-and-tell time. First up: Wearables.

Besides seasonal direct-mail and media advertising, I got to create several promotional items for The Rest Stop's use over time, in a broad spectrum that includes bicycle racing jerseys, signs, a racing cap, gift card, certificates, coffee mugs, and a water bottle. I even designed logos for beer brands; I can't remember if they were just whimsical notions for beer coasters one day, or if beer would eventually be produced as excuses to affix labels.

I worked on a mural that succumbed to logistical obstacles. I created flags.

In short, I made Dog, The Rest Stop's spokesdog, jump through a lot of hoops, which it did, with silent aplomb — which has got to be difficult for a spokesdog.

For the "Joker" jersey, never produced (boo!), dog played king and queen and joker:

I bow before the designers of playing cards; those card backs are marvels of intricacy,
of which mine is faint imitation; poor pink dog, how I tortured you!

Dog did double duty on the shoulder designs, my favorite part of the racing jerseys:

voler.com made the production very manageable with its digital templates.

The western terminus of The Pony Express in 1860 (we'll conveniently ignore San Francisco), Sacramento got a history revision from yours truly:

The penny-farthing'd Pony Express rider was featured on one of only two racing jerseys we could manage to ready for market. This one featured a rockin' and rollin' Sacramento by day on the front (including the state capitol building, the Renaissance Tower known locally as the Darth Vader Building, the Tower Bridge, a basketball for the Sacramento Kings and a baseball on the other side of the Sacramento River for the Sacramento River Cats) …

And the back side of the city at night:

Though not to scale, The Rest Stop store is just about where it used to be in relation to the city.

I've stopped riders on the American River Bike Trail to tell them I designed their jersey. And they've looked at me just about the way you imagine they would if a sweaty schlub stopped them in mid ride to say such a thing.

The other jersey The Rest Stop was able to make and sell gently parodied the Tour de France  climbing champion's shirt. It featured … guess who?!

The first jersey we worked on also never made it off the drawing board. Oh, how I wanted to see the so-called "flywheel" jersey out on the trail:

It would have featured, for the first time, the penny-farthing image and early
bicycles, including the da Vinci velocipede hoax.

Why? I don't know. It just needed to be done.

 And the best part, the shoulder patch:

One of the last projects for The Rest Stop was also among the most fun. A cyclist's cap that Greg himself models here:

Flap down …

Flap up…

And the best part of that project was making up sponsors' logos to adorn the hat:

Sonic screwdrivers were Greg's idea, inspired by Dr Who; Chain Food was an actual idea
I proposed for a long-ago client (who was a fool not to use it!).

Pace Sportswear also furnished an easy-to-use template.

Pink dog! Go, quick! Shawnie has fallen down the well!

One of the official ways Pink Dog and The Rest Stop's type logo is supposed
to fit together — though I hardly ever did.

That didn't take long: The pink dog finds its master!

News comes from Bob Dahlquist, a graphic designer's graphic designer, insightful conversationalist, friend and free thinker, that The Rest Stop's mascot is the creation of an artist named Rod Atha.

One of Bob Dahlquist's takes on a promotion
for The Rest Stop. The typography, as is Bob's
wont, is carefully considered.

Atha, whom Bob says signs his fine art "Zenichi," must have created the dog for the original owners of The Rest Stop, Larry and Yvonne Robinson.

Sometime shortly after Greg Archer bought the store, Bob put me in touch with Greg about helping with promotion.

For many years since, I have had the fun of promoting not only The Rest Stop before it closed, but also Greg's bicycle repair business and ancillary martial arts endeavors (and here) he's involved in.

Bob had worked on some of The Rest Stop materials too, and this trip backward has made me realize that screwing around with the pooch isn't anything new.

This sample (left) shows Bob's trademark care with typefaces, but also some canine haberdashery with the flowing striped tie.

I hadn't seen the old art files for The Rest Stop in years, if I saw them at all. Back then, my computer and computer skills were much more rudimentary than now, so I might have had trouble even looking at them. When I restored the separations on Bob's card, the pink shape in the dog was smaller and off register. Bob said "the off-reg wasn't meant to be, but it works out anyway."

Bob said he'll send along some early iterations of the dog, which hard sharper features originally, more akin to Antonio Prohías' "Spy Vs. Spy" cartoons.

In the meantime, Bob sent me pieces of Rod Atha/Zenichi's work in his collection; both are to be displayed thusly. The top image was created in 1984, around the time Bob says the pink dog got its start. Got any more information about Rod Atha? Please let me know.

My Medici, Part II: And a little pink dog shall lead them

Jay Ward and Rocky & Bullwinkle might have inspired this bit of nonsense.

Microscopically speaking, Greg Archer has been to me what the Medici family was to Michelangelo, a great patron making his art possible.

Microscopic in scale, not in passion. Michelangelo had tour bus-sized blocks of Carrara marble; I had 4 1/2- by 6-inch glossy cardstock.

{Maybe a better analogy — though still grossly out of scale — would be Walter Paepcke and the Container Corporation of America, and the Westvaco paper company (now Mead Westvaco), and the role those companies played in advancing American graphic design in the middle of the 20th Century.} 

Greg Archer,
wearing the
cyclists' cap I
got to design.

Greg's role as patron was the same as those giants: "Here is your design playground. Have fun!"

One difference: "Oh, and take the dog with you."

Greg needed a regular flow of printed marketing materials to alert bicycle enthusiasts to his shop, The Rest Stop, on a shady street near downtown Sacramento. And he wanted to amass a collection of useful textiles tying The Rest Stop to customers' daily lives. Sacramento is a bicyclists' city with its own amazing playground, a paved trail that snakes more than 30 miles from the Sacramento River up along the banks of the American River toward Folsom Lake and beyond.

The penny-farthing and the controversial image of an early bicycle design, attributed
to Leonardo da Vinci student Gian Giacomo Caprotti (or a complete hoax), make
appearances as secondary characters.

From the beginning, Greg gave me wide flexibility in designing his promotions. The one constant: each had to include a pink dog, the mascot Greg inherited when he bought the shop from Larry and Yvonne Robinson.

I don't know if the dog has a name or who created it (if you have information, you'd feature prominently in a future blog post!) It's bright pink, and its bug eyes remind me of the logo for the Mooneyes speed-performance car parts company I knew from childhood (as the world's worst builder of Revell model hot rods, even of the SnapTite® kind).

Though likely created in the early 1980s, the dog has an earlier feel, as if a stray from underground comics or psychedelic rock posters. I love that it has nothing to do with bicycles or bicycle parts, and would love to know its genesis.

Tiny and unassuming, the dog was nonetheless the 800-pound gorilla of every design, innocently but relentlessly imposing itself. Rather than grouse about it, I had to decide early how to incorporate it creatively. So I rebuilt it digitally in order to dismember and manipulate it.

A cardinal tenet of graphic design is that a business logotype is — usually — sacrosanct, with strict rules about its use, size, placement, color, typeface, and association with other logos should they appear together in the same promotional material. All for good reason: Brand identity is the most powerful and succinct public face of an entity, and deviations can send off or conflicting messages.

One of my favorites, inspired by owning a real dog
(not pink) and bearing witness to her desires
and capabilities.

My son, with many design opportunities already, notes that the design dictates BMW automobiles imposes on its logo use and placement offers no flexibility for alternative designs for a dealership campaign he worked on. Choose any BMW website and you'll see the same gray banner and precise placement of the circular checkered blue-and-white car medallion. 

Greg liked breaking that tenet. Though the dog's presence was paramount, no fences were built around where it was and what it did. Even the carefully drafted typographic treatment for The Rest Stop could be manipulated.

As a result, the dog became hero and jester in promotions, a silent Teller (and customers were Penn Jillette), for no reason more important than sending the message: This is a business for and about fun; come on in, visit.

Sacramento opens the city to an arts celebration
the second Saturday of the month. Though off
the usual circuit, The Rest Stop did its part
with bicycle-related artwork — and this
Lichtensteiny thing.

Market forces, including Internet sales, compelled Greg to close The Rest Stop. He re-emerged with Archer Bicycle Repair, for which I was fortunate to design logos.

Though our business relationship grew to include design for a jujitsu program Greg helped teach, and by extension his business partner's jujitsu camp, The Rest Stop's closure spelled the end of design laboratory, to experiment for public scrutiny. And Greg had more ideas than market forces allowed; but that's another blog post to come.

Here are some of the many promotions I got to help with:

Another favorite: When I felt confident that
The Rest Stop's customers would need only to see
the dog to know for whom the bicycle bell tolls.

Dog, just hanging out, atop the bicycle that da Vinci's student may have invented
but probably didn't. Don't let facts get in the way of a picture opportunity.

To know art is to mock it gently …

All good things having to come to an end, it seemed fitting that the last things customers would see were the searing, earnest eyes of the faithful, put-upon pink dog.

My Medici, Part I: New work

A happy accident produced this final look:
I absent-mindedly turned the image to white
near a black background — et voila!
fake Wedgewood.

Greg Archer thinks different, thank goodness.

For one thing, he changed his last name when he married, so he and his new wife could share it without a lot of paperwork muss. "Archer" holds more potential for a business name, frankly, than Briski. (My apologies to all people Briski.)

When Greg created his bicycle repair business, having closed his bicycle accessories shop, The Rest Stop, Greg's married name provided oodles of potential. Oodles being a unit of measurement in the illustration profession.

I got to know Greg when he owned The Rest Stop ("Everything for the bicyclist but the bike") near midtown Sacramento, and needed design of promotional materials every few weeks.

(Here I thank Bob Dahlquist, bicyclist, amazing designer and really interesting person, for bringing me to Greg's attention.)

Greg Archer,
polymath

The Rest Stop was a store for lingering, for long talks between shoppers and the staff, sometimes about items for purchase. And it prided itself on those items, including a hard-to-find kind of rear-view mirror that bicyclists came from far away to fetch.

As more and more bicyclists fetched their hard-to-finds on the Internet, The Rest Stop, literally a brick-and-mortar store, became more and more difficult to sustain.

Arguably the least efficient or
intimidating warrior in any battle …

Thinking different, Greg closed the store and attended an intensive bike repair academy near the Rocky Mountains. He opened Archer Bicycle Repair on his return, grease up to his elbows in the one thing his old store didn't carry.

In short time, on completion of life adventures he and his wife are planning, Greg plans to take his business to someplace like Chicago, where they'll settle. Maybe sell bikes and accessories too. Who knows?

In the meantime, Greg wanted a logo for his new venture.

This isn't really new work, but it has become official recently by virtue of business cards, the first of his "business system" (letterhead, envelopes, marketing tools) to be printed.

After scratching with a pencil the itch of the usual ideas (gears and sprockets and chains and spokes for "bicycle," and bandages and booboos and crosses for "repair"), I attacked the Archer idea, and eventually came up with the guy at left.

It's silly, and that's probably why we decided it worked. He's a strange Moderne time traveler, having brought from the future a penny farthing and an aerodynamic helmet to wage medieval battle.

A penny farthing parked permanently outside Greg's bike accessories shop, and this was a nod toward it.

Greg soon decided the archer was lonely and needed a companion: Diana the Huntress was reborn on a beach cruiser, somewhat evocative of Art Deco. Just as improbable, hunting on a boardwalk somewhere.

The beginning of the end of the beginning …

The connective tissue for each was that they should be "old" logos, suggesting they've been found discarded and given new purpose, or that the business has thrived for a while. I thought of the "head badge," or metal label affixed to the front of my dad's old Raleigh bicycle he wheeled around air bases in England and California, when I put these together. They have English roots, however vestigial.

That became more apparent when I accidentally reversed Diana's image (turned it from black to white), and saw how much more vividly it popped from a dark background. Change the background to a certain blue, and Diana emerges like some icon a potter at the Wedgewood factory cooked up on his/her off time.

Diana made a tentative debut, but now the penny farthing guy is a secondary — maybe even tertiary — icon for Archer Bicycle Repair. Diana became the "It" girl. Only one person has complained about her brazen ways. Eh, Greg replied.

So why the hell did I call this post "My Medici?" It has to do with all the opportunities Greg has provided me over the years, the latest of which is a mermaid. It all started above, with a moon-eyed Pepto- Bismol®™©-pink dog. That's part II.