Shortly after we launched the new website for Kay Jasmine Photography, she decided that she wanted her logo to be a bit more personal. The most recent version was using a fancy typeface, which worked for a while, but wasn’t unique enough.
One of the major problems with using pre-packaged typefaces is that when and if they become popular, you lose a lot of what attracted you to the typeface to start with. They become overused and the general public gets tired of seeing it (usually). So Kay and I sat down to talk about the direction she wanted to take her brand.
If she wanted something more personal, and infinitely more unique, it stood to reason that we should find a way to play with how she represented herself. Using her name in a signature type of layout was something we didn’t want to change, so we decided to have her sign a paper a couple of times to get a feel for how she wanted her personal signature to look.
After doing that, we singled out one that she liked, and that we felt was clean and usable. The next step in the design process was to create usable vector artwork from the signature. The image was scanned into Affinity Designer and then redrawn with a pen tool. The bonus of having everything in vector means that you can scale the artwork up or down and it doesn’t lose resolution or clarity. It also allows for fine tuning of the curves, just in case the signature isn’t exactly where it should be.
Most of the letters are done individually so that spacing and arrangement can be done easier and cleaner. It also allowed for sizing adjustments to help get everything looking more uniform in the end result. After the line art has been adjusted, it’s time to compare it to the original, just to make sure that we didn’t change it too much or take too many liberties with how the letters were written. This is Kay’s signature of course, and we want the end result to be an extension of her.
We do a side-by-side look and then add any other little flourishes that are necessary. The final step is the final composition with the other text. The studio name is Kay Jasmine Photography, and we want this branding to be a reflection of that. Of course photography is important, but in this particular hierarchy we want the name to be main focus, so we keep the photography tag as a secondary level. We also already know that the colors are black and gold, so we used that to add a couple highlights and break up the text.
When all is said and done, we get a nice, classy logo that Kay identifies with and has a more personal attachment to. The final logo can be used on any medium, and since it is vector we can easily change the color or size depending on the need on a case by case basis. You can view this in the portfolio by going to Kay Jasmine Photography.
