Creating a Brand
I wanted to go through some of the design process for creating a logo and website for my wife’s new self employed status. I will talk about the logo in this post and maybe talk about the website creation in a later post.
I had recently bought myself a copy of Adobe Illustrator with photo profits so I was itching to use it in anger and when Mrs G asked me to create her a website I was relishing the creative opportunity.
The Logo Process
I have dabbled with logo design in the past and indeed the “Simon Greig Photography” logo is one of my creations so I started my usual design process:
- Come up with some keywords related to the business
- For each keyword come up with some concept related words
- Sketch out on paper some rough ideas (I can’t hand draw for toffee so they are very loose sketches)
- Convert the rough concepts into Illustrator mockups
- Go back to the client with the mockups and get some feedback before spending too much time on each idea
- Finesse the feedback and agree
In this case Mrs G’s job is Speech and Language Therapy so I was looking for ideas based around speech related ideas such as quotation marks and speech bubbles. I did some research into other independent therapists and I saw examples of no logo (just text), a kids drawing, child friendly images such as a smiley caterpillar. The research also told me there is no common stereotype but, if anything, the traditional speech bubble is probably the most used.
So I started down the concept of speech bubbles but tried to make it a bit different. You can see the iterations of the design where I started with a set of circles that were intended to look human(ish). In the second example they progressed into something a bit more bubble like and then more speech bubble like in the 3rd iteration. I then went totally off on a tangent and created a speech bubble shape made up of a series of circles that represented bubbles. Of the 4 examples I think my favourite is the 3rd one down of this set.
I was worried that this set of logos looked a bit too corporate and a bit too ‘internet startup’ rather than a sole trader self employed therapist. The target market for this service is mostly mothers so I tried something a bit more girly by incorporating a flower into design. As I said above I can’t draw very well so the design needed to be made up of geometric shapes. I ended up with a daisy because it is nice and simple.
The first version was a simple flower with a smiley face to make it look friendly and child friendly. One of my theme keywords was ‘development’ so I extended that to mean ‘growth’ and came up with the second logo to indicate some growth. Finally I went back a step and just replaced the dots on the i’s with the daisies. Of this set I preferred the top one and Mrs G preferred the bottom one. My worry with this set was that it didn’t do a great job of representing the business. It could have been “Alison Greig — Florist” or “Alison Greig — Garden Design”. So back to the drawing board.
My last set of concepts was based around punctuation as I wanted to get closer to the theme of language. In the first one I tried (and failed IMO!) to create some fun characters based on Mrs G’s initials.
For the second mockup in this group I kept with the friendly face idea and created a face shape out of brackets, speech marks and an asterisk. I liked the concept but I think the result was a little ugly. I guess I could have done a lot more font research but there were more ideas in the pot.
The third example was where I started to get the ideas for the final image. I created a circle out of quotation marks and used it to replace the ‘O’ in Mrs G’s name. I quite liked the simpleness of the logo and this is probably my second favourite logo option after the one we selected.
In the final example I married up the flower and growth concept with the quotation marks to create a flower shape. The end result is a bit ugly but the concept of ‘growing speech’ worked for me.
After a few false starts and rework I eventually created something simple and unique that also incorporated the key concepts of language and growth in the form of flowers made up of quotation marks. The end result was selected by Mrs G instantly as being exactly what she wanted. I was trying to explain that it represented the ‘growth and nurturing of language’ but I think she just thought that it looked nice!
I chose an art deco style font in order to differentiate it from the Helvetica norms of logos and also because I know that Mrs G is a fan of the art deco style.
Mrs G wanted cards that had space to be written on in case appointment details or additional referral details were needed so I created a watermarked backing. We couldn’t decide on a pattern for the front so I used moo’s Printfinity option that lets you choose multiple image for the back of the card and created three subtly different designs. I think the next batch will incorporate more of the website design on them but as a first batch I am quite pleased.
