About Our Imagery
Where Do Our Crazy Images Come From?You’ve probably noticed that Prairie Dog Brewing products are oftentimes covered with interesting visuals like anthropomorphic prairie dogs in all sorts of scenarios. Similarly, our website is loaded with a plethora of imagery featuring animals in photorealistic detail and comic-book-like artwork. How do we come up with these ideas and who turns them into artwork? The answers vary and we’ll talk more about that in a second, but let us start by making in clear that animals are not used, nor harmed in any way in the production of our artwork. Likewise, who creates all of the delicious and mouthwatering food and beverage photography used on our website and promotional materials? Read on to find out more.
Prairie Dog Brewing’s Crispy Gurl Cold IPA can label artwork, by Kyle C. Bridgett.
Can Label Artwork
Arguably our most interesting and detailed artwork is featured on cans of Prairie Dog Brewing craft beer, like our Crispy Gurl label. Can artwork like this typically starts as a concept that our owners, brewery and marketing team members brainstorm and put into a text document, sometimes with preliminary sketches.
Once we have a concept developed, we work with a preferred artist to create the artwork that eventually ends up on our cans. At present, our can artwork images are created by an artist named Kyle C. Bridgett, who goes by the handle littlecozynostril online. You can check out more of Kyle’s work and reach out to him on his Instagram page.
In our earlier releases, Prairie Dog Brewing team members created can label artwork, like for “You’re Beautfiul“, which was created by Greg Loudon, our Brewery Sales Manager, and for Sour Expedition #1, which was created by former team member Kennedy Roberts.
Prairie Dog Brewing’s crest logo. Original artwork by Christian Schultz, with augmentation by Ian Harding.
Logo & Brand Elements
Prairie Dog Brewing’s brand identity really starts with our logo, which features our prairie dog mascot, Alby, holding a beer in front of a scene featuring barley in the foreground with green foothills and mountains in the background with a clear blue sky above.
The original artwork for this logo was commissioned on the 99designs crowdsourcing platform back in 2015, with artist Christian Schultz, by the handle c-artworker, winning for the best design based on our concept. You can contact Christian on 99designs here or reach out to us if you’d like a direct contact.
After the preliminary design was created, we worked with local artist Ian Harding to refine our logo and develop a brand standards guide. Ian also created several brand elements and related iconography based on the original concept, like the mountains below.
Prairie Dog Brewing mountain landscape artwork by Ian Harding.
Merchandise Artwork
Prairie Dog Brewing’s merchandise typically features common brand elements like our mascot, Alby, fields of grain, mountains, hops, etc. Most of these elements were created for us by Ian Harding, Kyle C. Bridgett, or Jayesh Bhagat., who are discussed elsewhere on this page.
While our owners weren’t the ones to create these brand elements, they are longtime artists, themselves, with graphic design, photography and image manipulation experience, so they typically assemble the related artwork into a design and create our merchandise, like t-shirts, growler jugs, and beer glasses.
Prairie dog playing guitar in country garb. Image created by AI.
Website Artwork
When working on our website or building social media posts, we often want a quick image of a prairie dog doing something fun. Maybe it’s a group of prairie dogs standing in a pile of kegs within an Alberta prairie scene. Other times it might be a wacky parody of existing artwork or memes, or a parody of pop culture imagery from movies or whatnot.
Whenever possible, we turn to the work of Kyle C. Bridgett, who has already created a huge plethora of prairie dogs doing a range of things for us for our Tail Twitcher West-Coast IPA can label. We also commissioned artist Jayesh Bhagat a few years ago to create a range of prairie dog characters that we use here and there.Â
Fishing anthropomorphized prairie dogs. Artwork by Kyle C. Bridgett.
However, there are times when our existing catalog just doesn’t cover what we want to convey, and as a small business we simply don’t have the time or money to commission an artist to create every wacky concept we are thinking of for a one-off post or page — a single illustration can easily cost well over $1,000. We are a small business, but even large business often don’t often have the budgets to support artist fees for an image that they plan to use just once on a social media post or at the top of a page like this one, where the return on a post might only be a fraction of what the artist’s work would cost.
This is where we turn to AI. Many images throughout our site, like the one above of a rodent playing guitar in country garb, or the image at right/above of a prairie dog in a hockey jersey with a famous cup, are created using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the DALL-E 3 image engine.
Without AI, we would simply have to do without any imagery at all in a lot of cases, or wait weeks to months until we have a chance to make our own photos, which results in less-interesting pages and posts.
A big side-benefit of using AI in marketing imagery is the ability to feature animals, which are a big part of our brand identity, without ever having to access, bother, or harm any animal. In the past, animal-related photographers did all sorts of things to get the shots they wanted. This is one area where we feel AI imagery has a big edge, leveraging the imagery created by past animal photographers to avoid having to do further harm.
One place where AI comes in handy is creating imagery that represent things happening around us in real-time. It took just a few seconds to come up with a concept and generate this image. Likewise, no animals had to be harmed or interacted with to make this image
These are not real people. This image was created by AI. Look closely and you can see many oddities in the image, but it gets the point across in the right context, where it isn’t the centre of attention.
That said, AI is not a panacea. Using AI is often a frustrating experience with images plagued by extra fingers, missing facial features or appendages, misspelled or unexpected words. American flags coming out of nowhere. AI is trained using the artwork of other artists found all over the internet, and as such, visual features that dominate on the internet often come out in AI artwork, whether you want them there or not.
AI also struggles with a serious lack of diversity. Photographic AI images are dominated by white-skinned people with certain body types. Even the stampede party image shown here has basically the same male face on 3 people with only minor changes to facial hair, and the woman at the table looks very skinny ad suspiciously similar to the person playing bass on stage. So we are not a big fan of using these kinds of images, and gravitate more to animal scenes or comic-book-like artwork.
Eventually, when time and budget allows, we will work with a real-life photographer to produce scenes like this to use in our marketing and promotional materials.
Fuller pit BBQ platter closeup featuring Prairie Dog Brewing beef brisket, pastrami, chorizo sausage, pork side ribs, chicken pulled pork and more, by Gerad Coles, 2020.
Photography
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we had almost no photography of our food and facilities. Facing the need to immediately pivot into online ordering with apps like DoorDash and Skip the Dishes, we needed product imagery, and fast.
Co-founder Gerad Coles was a professional photographer in the past, along with his wife Laura Coles, and he wasted no time in dusting off his camera to create the mouthwatering food and beverage photography that you’ve likely seen many times by this point. Gerad also trained other members of our team to create product photography using his techniques, carrying on the tradition.
Mouthwatering closeup of Prairie Dog Brewing’s Smoked Chicken Wings by Gerad Coles, 2024.
Today, the food and beverage photography you see on our website, promotional materials and delivery apps was created by Gerad Coles, Laura Coles, Greg Loudon, Graeme Rice, and Ian Harding, as well as some commissioned photography by Innovate Media.
Regardless of who shot the photos, we employ no trick photography. We order the food from the kitchen and shoot it exactly as it is. Sometimes our Chef or line cooks will take extra care to plate items in a way that makes them especially photogenic, but these are the exact same foods and portions that you get when you order at Prairie Dog Brewing – no exceptions.