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.

Media Kit: The Phillyfoodaholic

Meet Alyssa Laufer, AKA the Phillyfoodaholic (@phillyfoodaholic). She kept her social media presence as a food critic a secret (not really, it just never came up) with our newly formed friend group for a while. When she let it slip that she managed an Instagram that had over 1600 followers and was the reason she was able to try a lot of varying foods throughout Philadelphia, we all immediately followed her for support (and to drool during and after class).

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Design Quickie: Last Minute Business Cards (Real Life Application)

While texting a fellow classmate/friend about tomorrow’s career fair, I asked her if she needed me to print anything out for her: portfolio, resume, etc. She said she has all of that, so she’s good. I reminded her, “Don’t forget your business cards!” This was assuming she had at least gotten ones from the school of business when they were offered to us last semester. “I don’t have any!”

Feeling like business cards are important, I asked her, “Do you want me to whip up some quick ones for tomorrow?” She gratefully accepted and I decided that for today, this would be my design quickie. I had to raid my stash of papers and stocks to see if I had any white cardstock. Unfortunately, I only had light gray, and because I have a 6-cartridge photo printer that does not employ white ink, gray was not an option. However, I did have a pad of bristol vellum. Although it’s textured and not ideal for inkjet printing, it was the best I could do with short notice. I pulled out that pad, a cutting mat, my light tablet, my last pack of Letratac and a box of laminating sheets.

The front selections for Jojo’s business cards.

The front selections for Jojo’s business cards.

I went to work on these cards, keeping in mind what I did for her writing portfolio—she used gray, black and red. Although red can be beautiful, I felt like it would have been too strong of an accent color here, so I just went on with grays and black. When i finished a selection of three fronts and three backs, I emailed her a screenshot of her selections and let her pick. She liked “1 and 2”, so that’s what we went with.

I had her confirm her information was correct and went to work printing. The ink did just as I thought it would: it bled a little bit and the texture of the paper made the ink look spotty. It didn’t look terrible, but it didn’t look as good as it would have on a smooth, coated paper. An option I had would have been to print the faces on presentation paper, then adhere it to the bristol, laminate, then cut. However, I felt like for a quick, last-minute project, that would have been a bit extra.

Of course, my printer decided that it would not listen to my computer’s settings and print these sheets double sided, thus rendering more work for me in assembly. No worries. I printed the first set on two separate sheets, forgetting that I could just flip the sheet, re-feed it and it would be A-OK.

I took paper tape—you know, the kind you buy at Walgreens in the bandage section—and after using my overhead snake-neck lamp to put the sheets together and line them up, taped the sheets together on one end like a hinge and attempted to apply the Letratac to the back of one sheet.

I learned the hard way that my Letratac is so old, it doesn’t work as well as it would have ten years ago, brand new. Luckily, I had Tombow adhesive dots in that little pink handheld doodad and, with the help of my light tablet, applied adhesive on the backs of the cards, around the perimeters and then in the middles for reinforcement. I closed the papers onto each other, and decided it would be safer for me to hand cut these rather than use the guillotine for fear of squishing the ends.

I hand-applied the laminate to both sides of these now two-ply cards and began to cut them out by hand.

48 plus cuts later, the first dozen was done. For the second set, I decided to flip the paper this time for printing, which allowed me to have single-ply cards, and to cut down production time on them. Print, laminate, cut, done.

I’m pretty happy with how they came out for a quick 10-minute design and hour long assembly process. They’re not professional and if I had my way, I would have had a better stock of paper to choose from, as well as a printer with a heater so the bleeding would be minimal, but alas here we are. I worked with what I had, and after a few photos were sent, my classmate/friend is a happy camper and now she has 24 business cards to pass out at the fair tomorrow.