Way Huge® Swollen Pickle™ Jumbo Fuzz Dirty Donny Edition

Agency: Dunlop Manufacturing, Inc.

President: Jimmy Dunlop
Creative Director: Joey Tosi
Art Director: Graham Shaw
Senior Designer: Justin Butler
Photographer/Designer: Mick Waller
Production Artist: Hank Alva

Client: Way Huge by Jeorge Tripps
Country: USA
Type of work: Commercial Work

WAY HUGE® SWOLLEN PICKLE™ JUMBO FUZZ DIRTY DONNY EDITION
The look of the Way Huge pedals themselves has traditionally consisted of a quirky display typeface coupled with an equally quirky/juvenile double-entendre product name and fluorescent anodized aluminum housings. For the limited edition Swollen Pickle (limited to 1,000 units), we saw an opportunity to do something different. We collaborated with famed underground rock artist Dirty Donny Gilles, and his illustration of the Swollen Pickle character brings the face of the pedal to life with a garish 4 color silkscreen. Also, instead of identifying the 1,000 packages with a traditional limited edition paper certificate, we reinforced the campy, sleazy ’70s vibe of the Way Huge brand by producing individually numbered vintage-style hotel key tags.

The limited edition package includes: a Swollen Pickle stomp box, product manual, fluorescent PMS 802C buttons & individually numbered hotel key tag.

WAY HUGE ELECTRONICS® BEGINNINGS
Jeorge Tripps started hand-wiring guitar effects pedals in his garage in 1992, founding Way Huge Electronics® in a quest for vintage guitar tone nirvana that helped kickstart what would later come to be known as the “boutique” effects market. Thanks to their high performance and amazing vintage ’70s tones, pedals such as the Red Llama Overdrive, Foot Pig Fuzz and Cameltoe found their way onto the pedalboards of the world’s elite bands, including Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. In December 1999 the company closed its doors, sending demand for Way Huge products soaring, with online auctions hitting hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars.

WAY HUGE ELECTRONICS® RESURGENCE
In 2009, Jeorge Tripps and Dunlop Manufacturing, Inc. teamed up to re-launch the Way Huge line. Dunlop’s in-house art team set about creating packaging that spoke to the garage workshop heritage of Way Huge but with an added bright, clean sheen as a nod to the forward-thinking sonic voyagers brave enough to use them. Everything in the Way Huge packaging system was designed to look as though a garage-based entrepreneur made it in 1976. What appears to be a “one-size-fits-all” kraft box with poorly hand-silkscreened graphics is really a custom box with distressed artwork printed 4up on a flex press- the 1 color artworks, while all containing the same pattern, are rotated differently to give a random appearance when multiple boxes are viewed together. The label is designed to resemble a cheesy bumper sticker with fluorescent colors and crappy ’70s counterculture typefaces. Also included in the box: a printed “weathered” card that holds two souvenir buttons.