I mentioned a few weeks ago that I worked on a couple of logos recently. I thought it was time I let you see how they turned out. I feel like I should mention first that I'm not a graphic designer by any means and don't market myself as such, but every once in a while I get a project that bleeds into graphic design territory. The only logo that I'd ever created prior to these was a silhouette-based one years ago for my photographer friend, Chloe Aftel.

About a month ago, another photographer named Amber Mahoney approached me to create a logo for her company, Live It Out, after seeing Chloe's. Live It Out focuses on alternative wedding photography, although Amber also shoots fashion, boudoir, and band portraits. Amber sent me links to her blog, tumblr, and pinterest so I could get a better idea of the offbeat, vintage, fun feel of her company, which was incredibly helpful.

Usually, I only send a client 3 or 4 idea sketches, but I had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for Live It Out's logo, since Amber's aesthetic is pretty similar to my own, so I just kept doodling until I filled up a sheet of computer paper. Oh, and the ideas featuring the couple refer to the fact that Amber shoots her weddings with her husband, John, as a team. This is the idea sheet that I ended up sending Amber:

(click to enlarge)

Some of the ideas are cliche, some are creepy, but sometimes if I just keep sketching through them, I come up with some good ones. Anyway, this is the logo that Amber decided to go with and the final result ended up sticking pretty close to the sketch stage:
And this is the same logo with a variation on the hand-drawn text:

Amber liked some of the other sketches well enough that she commissioned a second design for her polaroid side project, Present Company, which I blogged about a couple of days ago. First we narrowed it down to these three:

Amber decided to go with the polaroid face version, but then I had to figure out where to put the text. I played around with a few different variations....

...and we ultimately ended up settling on this one:
Well, that was my very fun attempt at pretending to be a logo designer. I just approached these in the same way I would a simple drawing with hand-drawn type and I'm sure a trained logo designer could point out numerous errors, but Amber's happy and I'm happy, so I think that's all that matters.

I'm ending the post with a couple of Amber's photos because she's super talented and nice to work with. If you need a wedding/band/fashion/portrait photographer in the D.C. area, I highly recommend checking out more of her work!





(last three photos copyright Amber Mahoney via her blog)

Briefly pretending to be a designer

Posted on

4.22.2012

2 Comments
  1. thank you so much! I'M IN LOVE WITH YOUR WORK and am so happy with my logos. happier than happy. xo

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm so glad! you're the best client ever!

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