Pencils And Pixels

I took it upon myself to design some new branding for the things that I make and sell - such as prints, zines and cards - desiring to trade these under the name Byng Inc. through an online shop and at craft markets. Finding it difficult to take this area of my fledgling business seriously, I thought it would help to establish a visual identity for the 'shop' element separately to me as an individual creative. This meant that it needed to be distinctive to customers in a way that my project-based arc doesn't, and also shout a little louder about its bad self.

Here are some of the things I thought about when creating it:

+ Hand-finished        + Bold                  - Messy                - Busy

+ Professional           + Structure          - Corporate          - Forgettable

+ Colossal                 + Line                  - Shy                   - Pre-existing

+ Contrasting            + Scalable            - Illegible            - Jumbled

Like most of my work, the design started on paper, which saw me playing around with one of my favourite graphics class resources - isometric paper. Using this building block method seemed a good way to create the structure I wanted - i.e. to make the logo a self-contained unit that could stand alone without being put inside a circle or other binding shape (as well as showcasing my passion for 3-D typography loud and clear to the world).

Next followed some digital line trials to perfect how the letters would fit and wrap around one another, a process that created lots of possible and impossible constructions, my favourite of which I began to colourise, re-draw and edit digitally. Once I had made the inc smaller, the shape made more visual sense, and after drawing both line and full versions of the final emblem and bringing these up to full colour health, my last move was made by offsetting a secondary outline on top to bring back some properties of the sketch.

And lo! A shiny new logo was born.

Whilst it's not a perfect creation (and may lose it's novelty once I've slapped it onto 100s of stickers, business cards etc. etc.) it feels good to have some graphic structure in place and a scheme to work to when packaging orders and making promotional bits. Establishing it also means it can be played with, such as changing the colour ways and experimenting with applying it to different surfaces. Most importantly, under the contemporary finish and the bold lines, it really feels like me, somehow, and reflects something of my tactile process-led work without looking unfinished. And for that, I forgive it all its wonky bits, and all the adjustment time that the inc n stole from me.