Lovely Saturday to you!

I just got home from work. I am the senior mathematics and physics instructor at Sylvan Learning Center, and today I met with one of my ACT prep students.

It's rewarding work, but it wears you out, so as soon as I got home, I spoke to the 3 bad stoobio assistants, made sure all animals inside and out (I have a nice wooden house for a feral kitty I feed) had everything they needed, cleaned my catio from the recent wind storm we had, then I crawled under my covers with my lemon water, fired up my laptop, and assessed the work I needed to do for my art bidness for the rest of the day.

I will be honest. Sometimes, the design work I do isn't planned. I sort of fall into the perfect design, which is exactly what happened with my current rebranding. I'm not happy to admit that I wasn't brilliant enough to solve it. I was never really happy with the first logo I designed and that is my doing. Not because my design skills were lacking, but because at the time I began selling my art and opened my Etsy shop, I didn't have a really clear vision of just what kind of product I wanted to focus on; I didn't really have a sense of the style I wanted to present to the world.

This was my original logo and design.



It contained the bright colours that I use in my vintage design, but represented nothing of the vintage that I so enjoy. I even think my first shop customers were there seeking cool stuff made with glittered cats. Yeah, I needed a change.

So 2 years ago, I redesigned the logo and banners. I still used the aqua and lime colours (which will always be my brand colours), but this time since I had already decided that I wanted to focus on completely handmade original VICTORIAN and VINTAGE products, I needed my branded materials to reflect that vintage bent. So I added a cat silhouette that I designed, added an aqua damask behind it all, then created a note covered in romantic roses to announce everything my shop sells.



I was happy with it...for a while. But all the time it really nagged me that it still wasn't capturing my love of vintage and Victorian reproduction that my shop was now trying to do full-time in those bright, modern colours.

I have done design for enough years to realise that if you are too emotionally-connected to something, then your view of it won't be objective. I knew I was too close to my own shop, struggles and successes to design something objectively, since I knew in order for that to happen, I was going to need to let go of some of those design elements that I really loved, in favour of the full-on vintage look and feel of the design.

So, the other night, I went searching on Google for ideas of where to begin. I googled "Victorian logos" and some amazing images came up. I get very inspired by designs that I can immediately see with my own take, and that's exactly what happened.

I've used the online application Kittl for about a year, and since they have boiled down the difficult learning curve of vectors to a very user-friendly interface, it took me no time at all to add all the elements I wanted to include, and to delete the ones I knew it was time to let go.

It has always been my goal with my fine art originals and prints to sell to high-end clientele, and since I hand-design all of my digital graphics (I WILL NEVER EVER ENGAGE IN GENERATIVE AI--blog on that later!), I feel that those graphics will appeal the most to discerning individuals who appreciate the hand-designed touch. I didn't hesitate to add those sentiments to my new logo, icon, and banner.

Here's what I came up with for the logo:



As soon as I downloaded it and opened it in PSP, my mouth dropped. Srsly! I could not stop looking at it! The GlitterCat text has dynamic movement, thus catching the eye, Studios is smaller and necessarily so since it's not the focus, and even just adding the simple carnation rose at the top spells Victorian, vintage, and romance without being blatantly in your face about it. I even took a little liberty and added part of the old kitty I designed, thus keeping the cat imagery which I wanted to do. I tweaked my original very intensely-bright hues to values a little more saturated, thus giving it more of a vintage feel without my needing to change to something Victorian, like burgundy and ivory.

Sadly, I also dropped my original tagline: "Where beauty and technology collide!" I loved that, and it definitely fit my business goals, but for this new redesign, it just didn't "fit", so I let it go, and instead added the following: "EXCLUSIVE fine art" on the left, and "HIGH-END stationery" on the right.

I. LOVED. IT! In one 20-minute session, I had seemed to capture the look, feel, and graphical representation of my shop that had eluded me previously because I had been too close to it emotionally all those years before.

Here's my new banner in case you missed it:

And finally, I also quickly designed a monogram with my GC initials:

I was so proud of it and knew within me that it was the right look for me; I had finally hit on it! So I immediately went to YouTube, Etsy, and Pinterest and uploaded all new branded materials. Next, I get to redesign my bidness cards, my shop banner to hang on my tables at art fairs, and my physical brochures with my art catalogue.

I don't know if I could ever make my living off designing logos for someone else's business. It seems to take a quick-thinking and incredibly-insightful skill that I may lack. Those designers need to be commended, because logo design is difficult; they must capture the look, message, and feel of a business in such a small space and in such a short time that it is highly recognisable to you a year later, whether you see it on a billboard or on the side of a pencil; that when you look at it, you know immediately what you'll be getting.

What do you think? Did I capture my business theme, to offer Victorian and vintage graphics in updated, modern colours?

Let me know your thoughts, and I hope you have a lovely day!