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Five initial logo concepts were presented to the client:

initial concepts:


He preferred the typography from the first concept combined with the image portion from the third. Often this kind of mix-and-matching doesn't yield good results, but here it worked fine. In fact, the rounder typeface was probably a better fit than the contrasting non-rounded typeface used initially.

Note that in the initial version of the selected concept, there were no buttons or screens on the icons. This helped emphasize the hidden X in the center (you did catch that, didn't you?). However, some early test viewers felt that icons were not immediately identifiable as mobile devices - they couldn't identify them as anything for that matter. So we tried a modification, adding a screen and buttons to each icon:



This addition may have worked for a single icon, but multiplying it by four added a lot of visual complexity to the elements, and made them a bit too "airy", too (there's probably more negative space than positive space in each icon).

The bigger issue, though, was the way the added elements detracted from the hidden X - it was almost completely obscured, and much less likely to be noticed by a viewer. After a bit of thought and experimentation, the screens were removed - a very reasonable compromise, as the buttons seemed to be enough of a visual cue to indicate "mobile device", and the didn't detract from the hidden X.

Various color combinations were tried, but orangey-yellow and blue was the winner, with a slight shift in the blue to make it less purplish. The final logo (though the tagline may change):



I'm working on the website layout now. Leave a comment, and I'll text you some dollars when it's live (not really).

An Ounce of Professionalism

(previously published on FreelanceSwitch.com)

When you work in a creative field, certain assumptions are made about you. It's assumed that you listen to bands that no one has ever heard of (guilty), people are predisposed to believe that you'll eat strange foods (uh oh), and you're generally expected to look and behave like an "artiste" - dressing like you're from the future, not paying attention to schedules, being unresponsive to e-mails - that sort of thing. The image of the turn-of-the-last-century Parisian impressionist - complete with beret - is not wholly invalid here. I've seen it happen.

It didn't take me long to learn that even the slightest professional behavior - wearing an ironed shirt, preparing detailed outlines - even speaking clearly on the phone - has earned me points with clients. These things aren't exactly huge efforts - in fact, I once believed they were necessary to running a business - but apparently, not so.

It bugs the stuffin' out of me that the image of the aloof, carefree creative person still exists - but clearly, there are many of us out there helping to perpetuate that stereotype. "Ah, maybe he'll get to our urgently-needed website updates tomorrow - he probably got stuck at day two of Wizard World." Sheesh.

Clients have told me horror stories - designers took on their project, developed it 80% of the way to completion - then stopped answering e-mails and phone calls. What?! I even heard from one client that a prospective Flash developer said, on their first get-to-know-you phone call, "I'll call you back later - I have to take a [expletive deleted]." Come on, dude - you're messing it up for all of us!

But there's a benefit here - those low expectations can work to our advantage. It doesn't take much - timely responses to communications, well-designed business documents, sending source files before they're requested - to turn things around and impress clients. A little goes a long way.

Here's the flipside, though - I think there's a danger of looking too straight and clean when meeting with clients - especially clients working in an overly corporate environment. I think it's important to let a little of that creative edge leak through so clients see you as what you are - a "creative professional". Both words are equally important.

Natural Selections Stone logo

Natural Selections Stones is a company that sells... stones. No surprises here. The name is not a play on words or a metaphor. They're all about the rocks.

Since their ideal customers are architects, builders of high-end homes or the homeowners themselves, the logo needed to be elegant and classic. Five concepts were presented to the client, all in the same black/brown color scheme.

initial concepts:



The client liked the first option, but asked that the pattern of stone be less stylized and more based on a typical pattern for a wall of this type. I pulled in an architectural drawing and vectorized the pattern, then overlaid it onto the wall's 3D perspective. The result:


Though this version was a literal version of the pattern the client preferred in real life, it looked too rough when applied to the logo - and the shapes themselves were probably too complex for a logo, and wouldn't reproduce well, especially at a small size.

The client asked that the shapes be smoothed, and that the joints (the white areas) not run quite as long, especially on the smaller right wall. After a few more rounds of tweaks, we arrived at the final version:


The client liked this all-brown variation of the logo - even the text was kept dark brown. I did present a few alternate variations, with darker and lighter selections of the browns, as well as a few versions with only two browns (dark on the left wall stones, light on the right) but the client liked the variety, as it reflected what a real wall of this sort might look like.

We also increased the type size from the previous version to achieve a better text/image balance. Once this version was settled upon, it was applied to work vehicles:



And business cards:

And now I'm working on the website. And t-shirts. You gotta have t-shirts.