Oh My! Handmade

Making a good life since 2010

How a logo is born

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how a logo is born, logo design process, aeolidiaHello hello! Arianne here. I just took an extended maternity break from everything, including blogging, but now I’m back in action, and ready to take part in our handmade community again! As soon as I got back to work with my web design company, Aeolidia, I jumped in with both feet, and found a bunch of talented new designers and developers to add to our team, and we’ve been hard at work on lots of great new client projects.

I have really been enjoying watching the logo process on some of our recent projects, and I thought it would be fun to follow one project through from start to finish to see how a logo is born. If you’ve been thinking about having a logo professionally designed for your business, you may be understandably curious about how a designer can take your words and ideas and translate them into a logo that represents your company, is unique and memorable, and that appeals to both you and your ideal customer.

Our designer and illustrator, Tracy Bishop, created the logo identity for a new fabric shop, Lucky Lantern. We have a set of standard questions we ask that covers a bit of everything: what’s unique about your business, who your target customer is, what you want people to think about your business, what types of design you don’t like, and what other identities inspire you. Michelle from Lucky Lantern gave us a lot of information about her business, her inspiration, and some color and font thoughts. Here are a couple of snippets from that conversation:
Our business personality is fun, stylish and elegant. The logo should appeal to a wide range of people, but mostly to females who are mid 20s-50s. These females are home sewers and have a middle to high income. They sew for themselves, their family and some sew for their craft business.
I would like the logo to be quite contemporary with complimentary colours. My preference is for bright colours. I would like a font that is easy on the eyes and doesn’t make it hard to work out that it says “lucky lantern”.

Tracy spent a while working on sketches and ideas, and for the first round of logos, presented three options. Each option had a few font choices as well.

Round 1

Aeolidia logo, round 1
Michelle really liked concepts #2 and #4. For #2, she liked the colors, the stitching, and the layout, but didn’t like the tops of the lanterns. On concept #4, she liked the layout, the happy faces on the lanterns, and the style of the lanterns, but didn’t like the colors. Michelle and Tracy both agreed that “font A” (the one you see in concept 3, above) was going to work the best, with Tracy commenting, “I really thought that it was a nice combination of simplicity, friendliness, and elegance.” Tracy was inspired, and submitted new ideas for both, as well as three related concepts to look at.

Round 2

Aeolidia logo, round 2
At this point, Tracy had explored enough ideas and variations that Michelle was able to pick a single favorite to go forward with (2b, the red and blue “happy” lanterns). With the logo decided on, Tracy had a few ideas about how to incorporate the needle.

Round 3

Aeolidia logo, round 3
Michelle’s favorite was #2, with the needle sewing under fabric between the words. We all liked the open feeling it gave the logo. Now came the time for Tracy to narrow down the exact look of the final logo, and make sure everything was just right. In this stage, adjustments were made to letter spacing, line height, and the look of the graphics. Tracy made sure everything looked polished and lovely, and then she provided Michelle with the final files.

Ta-da!

Aeolidia logo, final
Tracy sent the final logo as vector files, which can scale to any size without losing quality – this means the logo can be printed super small for return address labels, or gigantic, for a craft fair sign, and look nice either way. She created a version of the logo for black and white printing projects, and also included versions with and without the tagline.
For this project, she created a PDF branding report, which is nice to have when you’ll be designing your own business cards, or taking your logo to a web or print designer to work with. The branding report includes a full color scheme with RGB, CMYK, Hex, and Pantone color codes, as well as fonts to use for both web and print projects that will complement the logo. In this case, the font used in the logo is also available as a web font, making it possible to use for editable text on a website.
Very fun to follow the process, right? I thought I wasn’t going to like dropping the creative work to focus on the business side of Aeolidia, but it’s turned out to be a great change for me, and I love to see what everyone on our team has been doing. It has been very rewarding to be able to take on more projects like these and be a small part of launching these new businesses into the world!