When you are given a giant old ugly pole five feet from your building, you have two choices, cut it down or make it awesome.

Lydian Dental was opening their second location in Austin and faced this very conundrum. When they called us we immediately said (probably yelled) “Don’t touch it”. Knowing that that pole was a gift from the sign gods, we were able to get city approval to grandfather the otherwise “non-compliant” pole and allow us to reskin it. We wanted to give Lydian Dental something for people to talk about. Knowing the proximity of the pole to the building, we were limited with what we could design and build. As always we started with sketches and wild ideas to develop early concepts. We delivered several initial options from smiles to speech bubbles, to a big box of illuminating floss. But it was the idea of a 23-foot tall toothbrush that got everyone excited.

Through the rounds of refinement, we always kept in mind that there would be two experiences with this pole in the middle of their already shallow parking lot. The first being from a distance as you were driving down Burnet Rd. at 45 mph. The second, up-close as folks walked by on their way to their appointment. We wanted to ensure that both experiences were equally impressive. To achieve this we maxed out our allowed height to ensure that this truly was a “giant” toothbrush. Then we leveraged the funny smiles and Lydian wordmark associated with the brand, creating a pattern using a tone-on-tone- approach with a spot gloss paint over matte. The results were a toothbrush appropriately sized for Texas, that in the day caught the eye of drivers and pedestrians, and at night was a glowing beacon of good dental health.

As cliché as it is, sometimes everything is bigger in Texas.