Thursday evening just gone I was hellishly busy with self imposed deadlines and one customer imposed deadline.

It was 10pm and I was tired…

….. but I really did need to get some more design work done before I was happy – I like to turn things around fast, I can’t stand piles of design projects or tasks sitting on my desk not done….it just starts to stress me out, I like a pretty empty task pile.

So it was about 10pm and I was sitting there with nightmarish creative block, moaning to somone on msn messenger about it whilst hitting them with bad design ideas.

Essentially I was designing a front end web design encompassing a logo design also, for a poker website, and this needed to be funky, stylish, modern, and yet every thing I see with regards to poker is just tacky and well ‘Vegas’. I was searching the internet to get inspired by something I saw, but just coming across with images such as;

poker chips
cards on a green table
people sitting round a poker table

None of it particularly inspiring until I came across a tacky clipart image of dogs playing poker – that was it, lightbulb moment, of course ….the classic theme ‘dogs playing poker’, so I gave it a whirl and gradually developed it to look like the image you see above.

The choice of attire has been chosen by the client based on three famous and current poker players, and the ipod on the female dog was their idea also….however I have just noticed that I have rather stupidly put the ear piece in a position that a human ear would be and neglected to note that this dog has it’s ears on top of it’s head. Ahem…..will have to rectify that before the client receives the final design.

Grrr…that might cause a problem because that is where the flower is to signify that she is female….I’ll have to think of somewhere else sensible to put that as I’m not sure I want it interferring with the line of the wire going into the ipod.

If she doesn’t have a flower she could be mistaken for a male dog with long hair. I can’t put a bow on top of her head to show that because that is hideous and naff, and also putting on red/pink lips or something is out of the question; we do not want it to start getting a Disney flavour to it – we don’t want ‘Minnie Mouse’ style poker lady dog………. Plus, I tried girly lips already, it looks really stupid …ha ha!

Have you seen any other samples of a different take on the classic theme of ‘dogs playing poker’?