Anchorage, AK – Mad Dog Graphx is helping The Salmon Project bring the King of Fish to communities across Alaska.
King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon is a wild tale of salmon and people throughout history in places such as Europe, the eastern United States, Canada, and the continental Pacific. Over the next year, The Salmon Project is giving away 1,200 copies at book drops in Fairbanks, Homer, Juneau, Kodiak, Petersburg, Sitka, the Mat-Su, Copper River Drainage (including Cordova), and the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
Volunteers Lisa Sparrell and Alexis De Leon discuss The Salmon Project and King of Fish with patrons at the Fairbanks book drop.
The Salmon Project supports and celebrates the connections between Alaskans and wild salmon, as a source of food, a source of pride, a way of life, and the focus of a lot of fun. They promote stewardship of Alaska’s salmon resources and work to find the positive, connective ways that Alaskans interact with salmon – and each other – through our economies, communities, and cultures.
The Salmon Project selected this book for their first statewide book drop because of the surprising and informative stories it tells about salmon – a fish Alaskans frequently think of as our own, but may not know as much about as we believe.
[L] Emma Laukitis picked up her copy of King of Fish at the Homer book drop. [R] Mike Mannelin shares one of the stories with daughter Talvin in Kodiak.
For the book drop materials, Mad Dog was tasked with capturing the energy, passion, and persistence that The Salmon Project has fostered since its inception in October 2012. Community inclusion, the incubation of ideas, and the creation of a space and platform for conversations and ideas were key elements of The Salmon Project’s mission, and needed to be reflected in the designs.
Although the books were delivered in conventional ways, the graphics were inspired by the fanciful idea of dropping the books by parachute – which seemed appropriate, especially considering how small and remote some of the communities are that The Salmon Project visited in 2014. Many are coastal towns and villages with a direct economic stake in salmon production, but several others are interior communities that nevertheless have strong cultural (and culinary) ties to Alaska’s most famous fish.
MDG produced a series of stickers, bookmarks, and rack cards used in The Salmon Project’s book drop.
Mad Dog has also been working on related pieces for The Salmon Project, including collateral materials, direct mail pieces, social media, and packaging.
New materials in support of the book drop will roll out throughout 2015.