Commission: Mambo Beach House Logo

Having had postcards printed of my logo for El Palmar, I showed them to a couple of people in the village both of whom run guest houses. They both immediately asked if I could adapt it for their businesses, but since I’d agreed to the first offer as an exclusive design (allowing for the fact that I would still use the original design for my own purposes) I had to decline the second.

I started by making a digital sketch using photos I’d taken of the house and we used this to plan the changes in more detail

The brief was established: to move the tower to the left background, add an illustration of the guest house in its place and change the text; adding the name of the guest house to a longer banner at the top and moving ‘El Palmar’ to the bottom instead f the flowers.

At this stage I made some line visuals to show the client, just to make sure they were totally happy with the proposed new layout. They chose this one

Then I set about adjusting the outline with my tablet.

I sent this to my clients and they replied that they had changed their minds and wanted the title text to reflect their ‘brand’, requesting that it be changed to match the style they had used to paint signs on their house.

I set about making the changes; first by drawing the new text on print outs of the logo, then by scanning them into photoshop

Finally I coloured the logo in photoshop and added a granular texture. They are delighted with it and couldn’t decide on which background colour they liked best so I gave them both including png, RGB and CMYK versions for web and printing use.

What did I learn from this project?

• I underestimated how long it would take me to modify my original design so I set my quote a bit low in terms of an hourly rate. 
• When the client first requested that I use their ‘fonts’ my reaction was negative as I didn’t really like it and felt that I’d done the job I was asked to do. However after considering it a while I came to the conclusion that their desire for ‘brand consistency’ was correct and that making changes to designs is part of my job and had to be accepted. We renegotiated the fee to take into account the extra time involved and I insisted that I redraw the fonts in my style which is more symmetrical and neat.