How Sincerely Valentines met Sunny Dundee
Inspired by our current exhibition Sincerely, Valentines – From Postcards to Greetings Cards we commissioned the amazing Dundee born & bred graphic designer Martin Baillie to design a range of items celebrating just how much we love Sunny Dundee.
The exhibition features rare photographs, promotional company magazines, booklets, greetings cards and historic postcards from the James Valentine photographic collection and the latter were the source of inspiration for our product range.
Call us old fashioned, but we loved these wonderfully nostalgic postcards with their classic format of different scenes around a central motif topped with a sentimental message and these became our starting point and formed our design brief. Martin then took this brief & ran with it, introducing the perfect scenery, depicted in a minimal abstract style of both V&A Dundee and the Discovery to either side of the central cat and dog.
Initially we looked at a cat without the sunglasses, but once we saw it in sunnies and we were sold. As Martin is made in Dundee himself, he knows his way around the city and it’s history, he added the sunniest line of Sunny Dundee, which cinched the design for us completely and references a much loved creative from Dundee’s recent past.
Only Martin could make our cat and dog look so cool!
We suspect that Martin might be more of a cat person than a dog person, as I think he found the cat easier to design than the dog, however once he landed the cool cat, the friendly dog design then followed.
All that we needed to do now was find some cute models....
With Love from Sunny Dundee Kids T Shirt
Best Wishes from Sunny Dundee Shopper Bag £15.50
If you know him, you might know that Martin isn't keen on having his picture taken, however somehow we managed to get a quick snap while he was wearing one of his own designs.
The lesser spotted Martin Baillie
The range starts at £1.00 with two cute button badges and includes kids and adult T shirts, tea towels & tote bags.
You can shop the collection here.
Find out more about Martin and his work here