Designing the London Dog Map Tea Towel
The London Dog Days are definitely not over, as we have designed and released yet another London Dog product! This time a companion piece to the London Cat Map tea towel that has been a best seller of ours for a few years now – the London Dog Map tea towel is finally here! So how do we go about designing such a thing? In this blog post we will tell all!
Where does the idea come from? Well, most of our ideas come during our daily lives, what we see, hear, read. Dogs of London was one of our earliest products, and this was originally inspired by dogs Anna saw around Peckham – back in the mid 2000’s there were a lot of pit bulls around Peckham! She began to wonder what type of dogs you might see a lot of in other boroughs, and so the idea was sparked.
Original Dogs of London map from 2011
Dogs of London did also become a map, although a bit sparser than more recent ones, and this was always a bit of a humorous piece, but visually inspired by various antique maps and works of art. It was featured on the Londonist, after Anna had a solo show where it was the main piece, and it captured the imaginations of many people!
A couple of years later, Anna designed the Peckham Cat Map, which again became hugely popular, especially as Sally at Persepolis put one up in her famous Peckham store! This one was inspired by a trip to Japan Chris and Anna went on in 2011 and they purchased a book that had illustrated maps of cats around Tokyo – they had no idea what anything said but it looked wonderful! Anna decided to make a Peckham version for the Peckham Open at Peckham Space (now Peckham Platform) that year, and so the animal map concept developed…
Japanese Neko map book, which inspired the Peckham Cat Walk map
A few years (and much research) later, the London Cat Map was the next version, originally a print, but after much demand, we tweaked it a bit so it could become a tea towel. And now we have the London Dog Map!
It begins with a lot of research, much of this had been collected over many years. It comes through books Anna reads, or just things we see around us in our daily lives, especially while out walking our little dog Dante, who has contributed so much – we would probably never have visited so many parks and other places to walk, or met so many people with stories to tell, without him!
A selection of photos taken of dog related things in London
Anna collates all the research together – on a very unexciting spread sheet - and tries to narrow it down to a manageable amount. Once she has some kind of list, she finds all the reference pictures needed to start drawing – mainly consisting of photos we have taken or researched on the internet.
All the drawings are done by hand in black biro, as this is Anna’s favourite drawing tool. They are scanned and tweaked in Photoshop, then added to the main design, which is made in Illustrator. The map of London is also hand drawn – it was originally made for the London Cat Map, so this time it didn’t need to be drawn again, we could just reuse it (phew!). All the text is added too, often it must be edited to fit in the space and look right.
Drawings are originally done in biro
Once it is finished, we print out a full-size paper version and check for spelling mistakes and typos (as we have learnt the hard way, these can be very costly!!). If you find a spelling mistake in the London Dog Map, please don’t tell us….
Anna checking the paper print out for typos! Image of the map being designed in Illustrator.
Once we are as satisfied as possible with the final design, and have chosen a pantone colour for the background, we send the artwork off to the printer, and wait with bated breath for it to return as a printed tea towel (once any final edits required are done). Most of our tea towels we print ourselves, but this and the London Cat Map we get printed by Stuart Morris, as there is so much detail, and our textile printing is limited to one colour due to the size of our studio.
A few weeks later the tea towels arrive and thank goodness they look amazing! Now we can pack them up, using the belly bands we have also designed and had printed, photograph them and put them up on our shop!
Next up? The London Horse Map (you heard it here first!)
The printed tea towels arrive and are then packed up in our studio.
