The Urban Hound at St. Francis HouseLogo Design Contest

Luxury, Style, Comfort, Community

“The Urban Hound at St. Francis House” and the “Dog Care Academy” are the result of a collaboration between The Urban Hound, Boston’s premier full-service dog care service, and St. Francis House, New England’s largest day shelter for adults experiencing homelessness. St. Francis House is recognized for creating and implementing job training and workforce development programs that help its guests transition from homelessness to self-sufficiency.

This new location of the Urban Hound will not only be serving an extremely wealthy, high-end neighborhood, but will train 24 St. Francis House guests each year in the fast-growing pet care industry. So not only is this logo geared towards a community outreach + feel good nonprofit mission where it's helping people who are homeless get jobs, but the main target audience and clients are interested in a very high-end, classy, luxury product. Also - dogs.

The Urban Hound uses orange, grey, white and black.

St. Francis House as a few specific colors - https://stfrancishouse.org/ but ideally, we would like to contribute one of our colors to the logo, preferably green.

As this is a collaboration, our logo has to contain elements of both organizations. It's obviously a challenge and we've understood that we'll have two logos: one that is the complete name and one that is a "stamp" or a short "graphic" that can be used for icons, and miscellaneous merchandise.

The logo we are seeking right now is that small graphic (doesn't need to have the full name, but it'd be cool if it did?) that ideally combines components of both logos. St. Francis House is known for our "House" logo that has lots of symbolic meanings (the house, the angel wings, etc.) pertaining to our mission of helping people who are experiencing homelessness rebuild their lives. We would love to have the house, or our just the muted colors, integrated into the stamp logo.

The Urban Hound is a bit more flexible in terms of imagery. They use a dog rendering in a lot of their logos, but mostly they use words. We want to take some sort of classy dog element and add it to the St. Francis House house/colors without making the house appear like a dog house - that has been our biggest turn off since trying to figure out what to do with the project. We do not want to give that imagery of a place where people who are homeless come to as a dog house.

We are open to anything as long as it incorporates both organizations. The dog day care is opening in a very wealthy neighborhood, and we will most likely be working with clients who aren't necessarily 100% comfortable with people who are homeless, we just want a logo that can really showcase TRUST and confidence and hope and forward movement, while also really driving home that luxurious aspect of someone at the Ritz Carlton apartments ubering their dog to the Urban Hound for daycare everyday.