Did you say logos?

Though I enjoy doing just about anything I do, I really enjoy doing logo work. Not because it earns me a great deal of money mind you, but more because doing such work often affords me the opportunity to shift my skills into max-overdrive, creatively speaking. Once I’ve got the basic research done, gears churn, buttons get pressed, and stick figures get drawn out with the sweep of my mouse. As fit & figure comes more and more together, ideas take shape, eventually realizing themselves in the happy faces of those I do such work for (including me, of course).

Take the logo for this site, for instance.

I originally began with the one you now see in the header, which worked fine while I got caught up sprucing up this new site. Once things cooled down a bit, I began focusing on what I really wanted to accomplish and how I might best represent myself in logo fashion.

Being a bit of an extrovert—the kind that will chat with total strangers on a crowded bus—the “hi” in “high” literally stood out in a rhetorical fashion (no pun intended). So I latched on to that, coupling it with my want to make my mountain climber a bit larger for those who might not have been able to figure out what the smaller version was. Mountain climbers and heights often go hand in hand, of course, and together with the hi in high peaks (where I currently live and work from), the two fit together like those hands and a pair of well-tailored gloves. This train of thought led to the version that resides just above this paragraph. Still, it wasn’t quite “there” yet…

Wanting to be able to use the logo for High Peaks Publishing in all kinds of places, whether this web site, on a business card and stationary, or even on a flyer I might mass produce, I decided it would be best to spell out the full name, then make the whole thing web 2.0 appealing (hence, the reflection). Finishing this work, I came up with the final result, which both represents what I am, the sort of person, as well as the quality and type of work that I do. I also like the idea that the coloring of the logo lends itself readily to adaptation, and that it’ll be easy to stick it just about anywhere:

All this really amounts to is something called branding (for the less knowledgeable), which has a great deal to do with identity (which is not necessarily the same as branding). One’s identity is very important when it comes to the business world, whether we’re speaking about my, your, or some giant conglomerate’s. It should speak volumes about who one is, what one does, how well one does it, and create the sort of impression that makes for a lasting one. Whether your brand, mine, or theirs, for that matter. And when someone experiences it represented in something like a logo, depending on the sort of experiences they may have had with those associated with it, they’ll hopefully be willing to try out your wares and/or services, and come back for more.

On Different Types of Material

You can also have your logos added to almost anything, whether screen printed, stamped, etched, or engraved, on all sorts of materials like paper, cardboard, cloth, glass, stone, metal, and what-have-you:

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Work I’ve Done

Following are some of the other logos I’ve done for others, please feel free to peruse them:

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Usable Docs (usabledocs.com) was a site I thought about creating a few years back for the purpose of advertising my technical documentation services (usable technical documentation). I created what essentially amounts to a splash page for those services, with the intent of developing it further sometime down the road. Right now, it’s a client portal, a place where my clients and I can store files that are shared between us.

Back in the fall of 2010, I was asked if I might be willing to assist with web site work by the folks who run the Keene Central School Community Education Program, a project I gladly took on. The existing logo for the Keene Central School needed some clean up though (you can view that one here), so I decided to recreate it in Illustrator and Photoshop, for use in the new site. The site itself turned out to be a fairly useful tool, one which we’ve since made dormant until the next active semesters (fall/winter).

Another update of an existing logo, one originally designed in-house by its owner toward the end of the eighties. The owner wanted to maintain the feel of the original logo, while giving it a fresh look, one that could be used to update his company’s identity to suit the times. This updated logo was used to design new business cards for the owner and his employees, as well as a full set of corporate stationary, including presentation folders. A web site redesign is also in the works.

Then there’s the shining lamp (Shining Lamp Publications), my other main presence on the web. For the curious, L.A.M.P. is actually an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, Perl or Python. Its use first became popular back in 1991 in Germany as a means of defining how the MySQL database was used in conjunction with the Linux operating system, Apache httpd server, and either the Perl, Python, or PHP programming languages. Since those days, many believe L.A.M.P. has come to represent the open source web platform.

Creating a logo for the Keene (NY) Business Association was a fun job, part of a much larger project that included the design and development of a new web site. Being a Keene local (and the Secretary on the Business Association’s Board), I was able to actively participate in the collection of design requirements that were needed to put together a web site that truly illustrates what our town, its folks and businesses, and our beautiful area are all about.

In Practical Use

Lastly, a simple example of [my] logo in use (as well as one of those QR codes that I blog about here):