A couple of weeks ago, Kevin from ThisConnect (my partner company) asked me if I was interested in designing a logo, stationary and a web design for a Brussels based photo studio. I took the offer and started with the project. This week, I delivered the last piece of the project, and i thought i share the design process.

Design Brief

When doing a logo or other design, it helps a big deal when the client informs you well. This time, i was lucky as the client had written down what his expectations were, what kind of style he likes, what colors he likes. Because the client is a photo studio that specializes in children photography, the atmosphere of the logo and identity had to be fresh, bright and friendly. The logo's baseline also had to be in 3 languages (dutch, english and french). With this keywords, I started doing some research in books, websites and games for children.

My Sketches

Sketching is my starting point when doing logo's. It helps me organize my thoughts and helps me being more creative and innovative in the design process. It's like opening a drawer in your head. So here are some sketches I did before start working in Adobe Illustrator doing the drafts.

Proposals

After the sketching process, I always take a couple of days before starting doing the drafts of the logo proposals, here are some proposals i did:

Font selection

Throughout the year, i collect all bits of pieces (i capture them with RealMac's LittleSnapper with nice fonts in the hope to use them in a client project later on. For this project, i collected all this pieces and searched for a letter type that was not too classy but more playful and stylish without being childlike.

I really like the font Jessica Hische - an extremely talented typographer -designed: Buttermilk.

I'm a heavy Flickr user and once in a while, I pick up (and add to favorites) some good font faces from contacts and friends. This Cocktail Shaker font was used in a business card made by Kelly Sims and i instantly liked this font.

Another great font i use for logo work is Neutraface by House Industries. Veerle Pieters wrote a nice article about Neutraface on her new superb looking blog. I think Neutraface is a stylish and flexible font that works very well for Headings and logo's. The only (little) drawback is that it has become so popular it isn't original anymore, nevertheless it is still a great font.

Once I found the font for the logo word, I had to combine this with another font for the baseline.

The client instantly loved the use of this font, so the final logo uses Neutraface in combination with Knockout (uppercase) by Hoefler & Frere-Jones for the baseline "pictures of life".

Final logo

Although I used different color combinations in my proposals, the client decided to go for 1 green color (Pantone 376 C) in combination with black for the final logo. The replacement of the "o" in the word "studio" with an "eye" was a last-minute decision. The Scribble effect in the eye was a starting point for me to use as a texture for backgrounds in the design of the stationary.

Stationary

After the design of the logo, other material had to be designed

• letterhead + envelopes
• business cards
• PowerPoint/Keynote presentation slides
• Corporate website
• Newsletter template

Dribbble

Dribbble (made by Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett) is a network for graphic artists on which you can give and ask feedback on the designs you are working on. I like the concept of it because getting and giving feedback is of big value to a graphic artist/web designer (you mostly work alone).On my Dribbble page, I got some nice feedback on this logo design which made my happy.