To begin with when I was designing my logo programmes like Adobe Illustrator felt a little too daunting to use. So I opted to just sketch out the initial idea I had for my logo on a little piece of scrap paper.
As a jumping off point I just wrote the name of the company 'Amy Clare Visuals', then simply started doodling in between re-reading my business plan draft.
The philosophy of 'Amy Clare Visuals' is "Creating Together". One of the aims of the company is to work with Creative Freelancers to build more of a community between us all. A lot of freelancers work from home, are sole traders and are quite isolated, the goal is to establish a warm, welcoming community through collaborative projects at 'Amy Clare Visuals'.
I wanted the design of the logo to reflect the philosophy and aims of the company. As I was reading it I found that I was drawn to extend the tail of the y along the words, curving it to encircle the words (symbolic of the welcoming community).
Symbolism was taken in to account when designing the logo in order to ensure that the logo properly reflected Amy Clare's philosophy and aims. An example can be seen with the leaves growing off the letters. In terms of semiotics (the study of signs and their meanings as defined by Chandler, 2017) leaves still on the vine connote freshness and growth. In the context of the company it is referring to the growth of the community and the fresh ideas new creatives will bring with them to collaborative projects.
The next stage was to translate this sketch into the programme Adobe Illustrator so I had a high quality graphic I could use across all the platforms (online or print) without the graphic getting distorted. Adobe Illustrator therefore is one of the best programme choices when designing a logo because it works in vectors as opposed to pixels like Photoshop. The choice of working in vectors over pixels is better for graphics because it means that you can stretch that graphic to any size and it will not become pixelated. Ideal for logos or graphics because you might decide to put them on posters which you need to blow up to humongous sizes.
This meant that I had to practice a lot using Illustrator, I had never used the programme before. It took me a lot of patience along with many trials and errors to get some kind of grip of it.
Feedback from these two first attempts proved that these designs were too rigid. They did not have the natural flow that the initial sketch had that reflected the creative process which the visuals of Amy Clare focus on and the freedom that going freelance allows individuals in the creative field to have. To build on this I began to explore the brush libraries in Adobe's Illustrator and practising replicating the fluidity seen commonly in creative mediums (painting, illustration and calligraphy).
Again feedback showed that this logo was too rigid so an entirely hand drawn logo was done using the stylus and a Microsoft surface in a tablet format which helped to achieve the affect seen below.
From there it was deciding on a final colour for my logo. I liked the green, but the original colour looked a bit too garish bordering on appearing sickly sweet. In order to find a more suitable colour I looked through Adobe's pre-formulated colour palettes specifically the nature ones (colours developed after those found in nature). The process of this can bee seen in the video below.
From here I printed out the iterations of the variously coloured logos onto paper to see which colour stood out against paper rather than a screen in order to ensure my logo translated well in print as opposed to only appearing strong digitally. Below is the final design of my current logo.
