Re-post: RõSõz Logo Design and Branding

Original post on my old WordPress blog in October 2010: "A freelance seamstress thought she just needed some business cards and ended up creating her own brand with me as her design guide. Time and money were limited for this first step of branding but we managed to agree on these two as the final designs."

So this was for my Mom. Why I didn't just say that, I don't know. Being so close to Mother's Day, I felt it appropriate to revisit this piece. The whole project was as simple as - she asked me if I could make her some business cards and I did. However, this was when I was establishing how I wanted to ask questions to clients so I experimented with a questionnaire on her for establishing a brand. Questions like "who are your competitors?" and "what animal best represents your company?" and so on. She was a great test subject and gave me a bit of a challenge with the typefaces, if I remember correctly. I had a whole list and she kept wanting to pair up typefaces that I specifically separated. The flower design was the easiest part because it was a vector version of a photo I took of a hair piece I had made out of satin. And the name - RõSõz - is kind of ridiculously perfect. Her last name is Rowe and she sews... done.

When it came time to choose a design for the business card, it just wasn't happening. She liked them both and wanted both versions to hand out. Maybe she thought the more colorful one would be good for artsy people and the standard one for the more square folk. She says she got a lot of compliments on them and ended up giving out my business card to folks, as well. I haven't heard from any of those people but hey, promotion is still promotion. 

Personally, I think people have been scared to talk to me (and other designers) about design work in the past. Like I was some artsy seraphim that can only be called upon for the most serious of projects. Seems like folk are wising up though. Trust me, no matter how silly or small you might think your idea is, there is a designer out there just itching to help you. And I'm not saying that like "oh we're so desperate for work" because even I have turned down work in the driest of seasons because of various reasons (usually because the client was untrustworthy or rude). What I am saying is that we love to take ideas and make them into functional works of art. Love it.

I hope ya'll don't mind a few more re-posts from my old blog. I just really like a couple of the topics and didn't want to leave them behind in WordPress land. 

with love - M

Useful Design Tools: Google Drive

'What?' You might say. 'Design tool? Google Drive doesn't have anything to do with design as we know it!'. And in a way, you'd be right. Drive has a drawing tool but I haven't found much use for it yet. And then there's all the little add-ons like Conceptboard or Mind Map but I still prefer a good ol' fashion spreadsheet most of the time.

But you want to know what I encountered? While freelancing with a very small company recently, I was bombarded by their awesome use of Drive. It was a real 'duh' moment for me. Of course! Why not use Drive to store everything! As the day went on, it started to look more and more like an asset library and I was finding myself getting more and more excited about the possibilities.

The Cloud. Que the ooh and aahs surrounding this buzz word. But seriously folks, it has the potential to be a powerful tool. In my mind, small companies and individuals stand to gain the most from these tools. Obviously one of the best things about Drive is that it's free. There's Dropbox and other tools like it but none of them have all the other features that Drive has, at least not for free. And there stands another great thing about Drive - it's a tool box.

Remember way back when it was just Google Docs and it was goofy sometimes and didn't always work as awesomely as we all might have hoped. All you could do was upload other doc or excel type formats and pray the formatted properly. Then things just kept evolving until WHAM they made it a 'drive'. Now I can create a document, spreadsheet, form, presentation, or basic drawing, the formatting actually works, add people to it for editing or viewing only, and create folders to organize all this stuff in. THEN I can add any kind of file, regardless of Drive's ability to read it (yet!) and organize that into these folders and subfolders for these same people to use.

Amazing, I know. In case you're still confused at all about the awesome power of this setup with regards to a small company or individual, let me further explain that gig I mentioned earlier. Only two of us were there, the editor and myself as the designer. It was a small newspaper style publication, about 30 pages. There were no servers, no company emails with huge file size capabilities, no giant backup drives to pull files from. I assumed the worst - going back and forth with usb's or something similar. But no, the editor began sending me all the files I would need via Gmail and Drive. It was like magic. And as I finished a round of changes for her to review, she'd make her own changes on that version for me to add in while I moved forward with other changes on other pages. It was like magic. We were a model of efficiency. And I knew that if something happened to those computers, we would have the last round of changes saved via Drive. Being a freelancer who has often worked without a backup drive, I cannot tell you how comforting that was.

I'd love to hear what other folks have to say about Drive so please leave a comment. I'm going to go dive into the forums now to see what others have to say about this so there might be some edits or second post on this later. For now, this is just my experience and understanding of Drive and how it can relate to workflow efficiency. Can't wait to use it with the next client!

with love- M