Update: Casa Gaia Logo Commission

Back in April I submitted some sketches to my clients for approval. The first stages of the process are posted here. 

They really liked the seedling logo but suggested (following advice from their designer friend) that it be compressed slightly to fit the ‘golden proportion’. I’d worked with this proportional theory in a previous project but had completely overlooked it here, so this was very good advice and it worked beautifully.

June 2013

Choosing the font: I wanted a soft, smoothly rounded font, sans serif which would fit in with the curved, hand drawn feel of the logo.

I referred to the crib sheet I’d made of all the fonts available in photoshop,

finally selecting Hobo Std, which I tried in various positions with different curvatures. I showed my client these permutations at our last meeting and we settled on this one.

At her suggestion I adjusted the kerning and altered the shape of the G in photoshop to differentiate it more from the C. I’ve just emailed her the updated image so that she can discuss it with her husband and designer friend and I will make some coloured versions once the outline and text have been approved.

I showed her some colouring options and she much preferred the warm, hand-made quality of the pastel effect in Corel Painter12 to the effects available in photoshop.

November 2013

My client’s designer friend felt that the Hobo Std font wasn’t serious enough so the three of us arranged to meet and work through the final stages together. 

The font crib sheet was really useful in this situation and LIthos PRO was finally selected for its simple elegance, good weight, Greek style (Gaia is a Greek word) and also the curves of the font complement the curves of the logo.

It was also decided to include a simple border and a light olive green background to define the space around the drawing.

Here are the final versions

Actually these turned out to be not so final afterall...I had misunderstood the border concept and a last minute request was made to adjust the kerning between the CA in casa (too close) and the AIA in gaia (too far).

So these are the approved final versions

Learning points

This was a very rewarding project:

• Lack of deadline meant the design could evolve organically
• Advice and input from an experienced designer and clients made the best result possible
• Clients chose my design rather than asking me to adapt the sketch of someone else which would have felt like ‘cheating'
• The final logo is elegant, simple and strong and tells the ‘story’ of the house
• Opportunity to develop skills in graphic design, adobe photoshop, adobe illustrator and corel painter
• The CMYK versions for printing are so far proving problematic in terms of the maintaining the brightness of the green but I will work on this further.