Monday, December 23, 2013

Happy Holidays! and oh shit... Branding.....

Happy Holidays everyone!

As I get a few days of respite I work I have taken some of this time to work on myself and my own personal ventures. I have very little work to do when everyone else is on vacation for the holidays so I might as well make the most of the time.

I am in no way, shape, or form a graphic designer but I dabble a little bit for my own sake. I know I need business cards and I need to get a branding strategy together for my wee little yarn store in the works. I didn't want to deal with bubbly or fancy lettering. I've always been a fan of a straightforward easy to read font with a little class and vintage feel. My go to font is a Courier or Typewriter style.
Since I didn't want to use the font as cute or catchy thing in my store name I decided I wanted to do a fancy ampersand. I LOVE the ampersand.

Today I broke out the good ol scrap papers with some heavy 7.0 mm roller ball pens and graphite pencils to get my rough sketches down as I work on this whole branding thang. Branding is very important to a business and I am not trying to down play it at all. It just isn't my specialty nor do I feel that I have the skill set to make it as good as it could be. But these are the breaks when you have very little, to no money allocated in the business for this kind of thing. My main focus is having the funds for stock in the store and rent for at least 5-6 months squirreled away for any emergencies.


I have taken inspiration from the Georgia BOLD style ampersand into these two iterations. I knew I wanted to use the knitting needle in some way and of course the yarn. The difficult thing is thinking how literal I wanted it to look like am ampersand. I wanted it to still have a little mystery and quirk. One of those things that you might assume and not get right away but the closer you look you can get a little chuckle from the nuance of this logo.



I think I much prefer the ball of yarn version even though it isn't as clear. It is just for branding and its like that game where you can put the letters to a simple word out there in the wrong order but the brain still knows what word was intended.


I've also started to hunker down and look at my vendor applications for whole sale ordering and realizing I need to get this business cap on and get active with the business account, email, and get card made. 

There is a lead on a possible location! but that's all I'll say. I'm not going to stress out until May about having a location but of course the sooner the better.

Cheers! and have a wonderful holiday with your family, loved ones and furbabies if you have them!