Another of the rug designs for Backyard Enterprises. Jeff Swensen did all the design work for BE products.

There’s quite a bit of BE material. In order to keep variety in my posts I’m going to be just posting the BE stuff on weekends. So, if you love visions of cartoon animals handling toxic wastes, you’ll want to be back here every Saturday and Sunday.

An example of one of the Backyard Enterprises area rug designs.

Besides booklets and posters the major product we designed were rugs. Since most of the business Backyard Enterprises planned to target were industrial spaces most of them also used some sort of area rugs that needed to be replaced on a regular basis. We found our client a source that printed logos and original designs on rugs and then set about designing a variety of simple messages and illustrations to go on them.

Besides the written materials Backyard Enterprises planned to offer products that would function as visual shorthand reminders of the rules outlined in the text. That means, of course, posters! Yay!

Backyard Enterprises was supposed to produce educational material about the proper (and legal) ways to manage and dispose of hazardous waste. The material was to be designed for entry level workers and meant to be concise and easily remembered. The man who hired us to create the materials worked in the chemical industry. Nizzibet took and passed a course on hazardous waste regulations in order to give us a better background in the subject.

I’ve spent some time in the last few weeks copying data off old zip disks and transferring it to my current back up drive. The zip disk is now an obsolete technology. Did it even have a ten year run?

In the process of transferring the data I found a few images that seemed worth sharing. It’s a mishmash of stuff. A large portion of it relates to Backyard Enterprises, a project that Labor of Love worked on in 1998 and 1999. Backyard Enterprises was a start-up company that hoped to establish itself as a creator and seller of humorous products designed to educate entry level workers in the proper management of hazardous waste.

BE’s mascots were the Agents of EARL, three cartoon characters who lived to teach people the proper way to dispose of their chemicals. I designed the characters. I couldn’t tell you now why I chose these particular species. I do remember that the armadillo came first.

Shep Hendrix designed the BE logo and inked the Agents over my pencils. I believe that Jeff Swensen designed the Agents logo. He was certainly heavily involved in the design and production of BE’s proposed line of products.