Character illustrations for a pet company
SFC is a dog-sitting company in Virginia — a small team coming up on ten years in business. They wanted a t-shirt to mark the anniversary. What they needed was a brand.
Until that point they had no design assets at all: no artwork, no palette, no established look. So whatever got drawn for that shirt was going to become what the company looked like by default.
What the brief actually needed
A ten-year anniversary tee sounds like a one-off job. It wasn’t, because there was nothing underneath it. The real decision was never what to put on a t-shirt — it was what kind of company SFC wanted to appear to be.
The answer came from the operation rather than from a moodboard. They are fun, quirky and don’t take themselves too seriously, and that had to come through without tipping into cartoonish. They also look after a genuinely broad range of dogs and owners, so the style had to work for all of them at once — warm enough for someone handing over a nervous rescue, playful enough for the people who buy their dog a birthday present.
That’s how most of my graphic design work runs — an identity plus the system to use it, rather than a logo handed over with no instructions. If you’re weighing up what a new identity should cost and cover, the guide to what a graphic designer actually does sets out the whole scope.
A cast, not a mascot
A single mascot gives a business one thing to say. A cast gives it a vocabulary. Each dog was drawn with its own face, posture and expression, so the same set could carry a birthday post, an apology for a rained-off walk, a welcome pack and a shop front without any of it feeling repetitive.
That mattered more than usual here, because SFC’s clients don’t all own the same kind of dog. A single illustrated breed would have told most of them the company was for somebody else.
Drawn for screen printing, built to outlast it
Everything was drawn as vectors in Illustrator rather than painted as pixels. On a t-shirt that is a practical decision: screen printing needs clean separations and flat, confident colour, and a vector file gives the printer exactly that at any size.
The longer-term payoff is that the same artwork drops onto a tote, a sticker, a van or a social post without being redrawn. The anniversary shirt paid for the illustrations; everything made since has been free to produce.
What it did
The shirts sold 380 units in six months, taking $9,500. More usefully, the illustrations did the job the company had nobody else to do: they brought in 73 new clients, and the team almost doubled off the back of the work.
SFC have since come back for a wider range of merchandise built from the same cast of characters — which is the clearest signal that the system works. A one-off tee sells out and stops. A set of characters keeps earning.
“We are so in love with our illustrated collection of dogs Helen designed. She understood what we needed and was so easy to work with.” — Faye Angelique, founder, SFC