EGD: Lash Paradise Beauty Lounge

Although I don’t wildly spend money on things I can’t afford, I’d like to say I have expensive taste. I enjoy looking at clothes, buying prestige brands when I shop for makeup, and not settling for store brand things when I know I can get the national brand names. I’m not great at saving (though I try), and I dunno… I wanna be fancy, I guess.

My boyfriend’s soon-to-be daughter-in-law, Torianna, has her cosmetology license and has been working doing hair (blowouts, specifically) and lashes for years at this point. She started her own LLC doing lashes and cleverly named it after herself: Lash Paradise. (Torianna’s last name is Paradise—cool, right?) She started by working out of her home in a cute little room in the house she and her two children shared with her mother and stepfather. There were cute and bougie lash-themed decorations, a nice bed lined with that crinkly paper you find in the doctor’s office on a roll, a small rolly-stool for the tech to sit while she’s working, and a nice little organizer on the side with all of her tools and supplies.

Over the years, she’s built up her clientele, and as a fellow woman with expensive taste, she also had dreams of having a high-end salon.

During the pandemic, she came to my boyfriend and me and announced she found a space and was going to rent it for her own salon. She wanted me to design the logo and signage and my boyfriend would take care of getting the collateral fabricated and he would install.

I was trying to wait until the salon’s grand opening before posting this blog, but the grand opening was also supposed to be a couple of months ago. The salon is open and operating and books fast! Contact and location info will be at the bottom of this post.

Lash Paradise Beauty Lounge, located at 127 Greentree Rd Ste 3, Blackwood, NJ 08012, is not too far from the on-ramp to 42 N (North-South Freeway) with easy access to Deptford shopping areas, 295 N and S, and the Walt Whitman and Ben Franklin bridges to Philadelphia. It’s also close to the AC Expressway, linking Philadelphia to Atlantic City, and Rt 322 for a more scenic route to the southern shore points.

You can call the salon at (856) 535-8569 or visit their website at https://lashparadisebeautylounge.com/home to book an appointment.

Logo: Slayed By J

I was trying to wait before writing an official blog post introducing my latest logo design, as I wanted to take some hero shots of the collateral that comes with it, but the South Jersey-based makeup artist I designed it for debuted the logo and is using it on a lot of her things. I guess because it’s been out in the air for over a month now, I felt like now was a good time to show it off.

Currently, we’re working on some menu handouts for her to give her clients, and I plan on surprising her with some other unnamed things around Christmastime, namely business cards with some gold foil and spot gloss and mayyyybe some stickers.

Anyway, I present to you, Slayed by J:

Shown above are the logo in three of the four colorways. The fourth is an all white version that can be used on dark backgrounds, when appropriate. The one currently being used the most is the pink one I show large.

This design was one of the easier ones to accomplish, as Jocelin (“J”) was very vocal about what she liked, didn’t like, and wanted to see. It makes a design task more enjoyable when you have information and input from the client. After all, they’re paying for it, and there’s no need to drag on a job longer than you need to.

Her vision, she told me, was to use a script face, modern, on a layout that was simple, clean, pretty, and classy. The hardest part, I think, was having to find just the right typeface/font to use for both the “Slayed” and “By J” part. Did I want to use the same for both? Would that be too busy and tacky?

And although we weren’t into the color phase yet, we did talk about it in the beginning, just so I could try to design in my head. One thing that stood out was she asked for glitter in the words. I warned her about using glitter texture in her logo. Glitter looks great on screen, especially if you can animate it, but going to print, it’s not always going to translate well, especially when you’re working in grayscale. It will become too busy and distort whatever it’s on, and because most of the strokes are thin, it would look so weird.

I convinced her using this reasoning, but told her I’d figure something out; thus, the sparkles were designed, used, and were a hit.

I also threw in a version (seen in the screenshot above) that used no script, just sans serif, just to break it up and see if maybe her vision would sway. She didn’t, her wants were adamant.

The final design used an ever-so-slightly altered version of the free font, Andasia, for the script, and Avenir Next in Ultra Light for “by J”.

Moving on to color, we explored a few combinations using colors found on Jocelin’s booking page: dusty pinks and greys with accents of gold and deeper shades of a modest pink.

Originally, she told me during our kickoff meeting she wanted purples and golds, which if I can be honest, sort of fits her personality. After reviewing her own assets, however, she decided on more subtle and classy colors, thus adding that modern chic touch that tied in with what she was already using.

The color round of this project went smoothly and quickly, and we were able to build three palettes: B&W, Gray/Pink, and Gray/Pink with a gold added.

The beauty of this is her colors can change with her tastes while staying within the palettes, so as long as everything else she does stays the same or similar.

Because color is the last step, once this was finalized, I packaged everything and sent it on over to her. From here, we moved into collateral. As mentioned earlier, we’re working on some handout menus for her clients, current and potential.

With these, we’re ironing out final colors and textures. This seems to be the more difficult part, because the size of these is small, and too many things like lines of copy, photos, and backgrounds can really clutter the layout, and then it won’t work. Below is where we’re at, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

I’ll be updating this post as more of the collateral gets finished.

Below are screenshots of where the logo can be seen. And of course, if you’re in the South Jersey/Philadelphia area, you can book with Jocelin to have her slay your look for any special occasion or just because. All services and pricing can be found on her booking site, linked above.

Emchi Social Media

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While driving through town one day, my boyfriend and I noticed a new nail salon had opened up. From the outside, it looked big, well-lit and really nice. The following weekend, I made an appointment.

Walking in, I was impressed—the color theme inside was pristine white, black and crystal. They looked to be full-service - hair, nails, makeup, the works! Every nail station was occupied, and a good number of the massage chairs for pedicures had a content customer seated, receiving their seemingly much needed ped pampering session.

A few minutes after signing in for my appointment, I was called to a station where I met one of the co-owners, named Peter, who was also happy working in the salon as a nail tech. After talking with him for a little bit, he learned that I’m half Vietnamese and could speak broken Viet. He, elated with this situation, began telling everyone around him about me and a relationship was formed. One of my appointments, sadly was not with Peter, but with a woman named Nicole with whom I would soon develop a different relationship—a working relationship.

Peter, his wife, and Nicole were working on a very important project: their own line of dip powder, a new, but popular, product in nail salons. They needed a designer to help with social media ads to promote Emchi (Vietnamese for little sister). In talking with Nicole, I told her what I did for a living and she asked for my phone number. I left her with a personal business card and from there we took off.

I designed the ads for every demo day, holiday, trade show, convention and anything they needed visual content for. These layouts went on their Instagram and Facebook to alert people of what, when, and where and it seemed to work for them because they kept emailing me back.