Why The New Brand?

You might have noticed that I’ve had a bit of a re-brand over the last week or two, a new logo, some new colours, graphics, page layouts and a few things that have yet to make it from my computer screen and into the real world!

It’s actually something that I’d been thinking about for a long time for various reasons and a few weeks ago I tentatively put curser to screen and started to work up an idea that had been rattling around in my head. To be honest I didn’t expect to have everything live as quickly as I did – what can I say, I fell in love!

But why?

My very first logo was created before I’d even set up my business, it was something I used as a twitter icon. It was on my CV and my very small portfolio site. It was colourful and simple but, if I’m honest, that was about as much thinking as it had behind it. When I started my business for real I should have ripped it up and started again with a clean slate and some good strategic thinking. I should have sat down and worked out what I wanted to communicate, who my audience was, who my competition was etc – all the things I’d spent the pervious nine years doing with clients. But I didn’t, I broke all my own rules, all the rules I’d been telling my clients off for ignoring , the same rules I would bang on about when pulling a bad brand to pieces. I broke them all. Bad Sam.

But I broke them because of one major problem. Even though I knew all the right questions to ask, I had no idea how to answer them. How could I? I’d only been in business for 5 minutes. On my first day working for myself, and for quite a few months after that, I had no real idea what my business was even going to look like. I knew I could design things, I knew I could pick up freelance work and I knew I could get some design clients of my own but also knew there would be more to my business than that, I wanted to create products, run my own label, licence designs to big companies and sell my work to high street shops. But this was all new territory for me. I had no facts or data, and not even much in the way of gut instinct, to back me up. Who were my customers?! Ha, I couldn’t even tell you what my products were going to be!

So the design solution was as much of a work in progress as my thinking (and my business) was – take what you’ve already got, tidy it up, pop it on a business card, website and invoice template – sure it was kinda eye-catching, a bit different and I could reverse engineer some thinking into it; I’m a brightly-coloured designer nerd – it’s a brightly-coloured logo; My business involves many things- it’s a combination of multiple elements. But the words did’t really sit well with the icon and it needed a bounding box to get it to behave nicely with other elements. However over time it began to feel like my business.

So where am I now?

I know my business much better now. I know where I am and more importantly I know where I want to be, and it was becoming increasingly clear that my current look and feel wasn’t going to cut it anymore.  I’d started to break my old logo, pulling it apart to use in other ways, adding new colours and not using it in places that it should be – a sure sign something was wrong! I needed a design that was a bit more polished, versatile and, dare I say it, grown up. But I didn’t want to kill off the personality, that is a really key part of my business and my products, so getting a design that was a good mix of all of these was a challenge. The main form of the logo is a simple, crisp circle that houses a series of interchangeable patterns and my name in a font that’s a twist on a classic Deco look. The colour palette is full of fun bright colours all grounded by my navy blue – the only thing left over from the old brand! I’ve made sure any brand rules I’ve imposed on myself are nice and loose so I can really play with things, especially in terms of how all the patterns interact with each other and any photographic elements.

I also now know what I need the brand to work on – from business cards and invoices to swing tags and on the back of cards and notebooks. Knowing what kind of applications the brand has to work across really helps structure it so it holds together as a suite of items. I’ve had great fun getting to know it as I’ve played it out, finding fun ways of using the circle device and the brand patterns and think there is loads more fun to be had, I can’t wait!

So take a look for yourself and keep an eye out for more new brand rolling out over the next few weeks.

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