A good kind of Diva

I was delighted to see a luxury gift wrap and accessories shop in our little village. It seemed like fate as I am currently a little obbessed with papers and packinging. What is even better is that the couple who run business are just lovely people who are friendly and make it such a welcoming place to browse in (which I am doing quite a lot of recently).

Anyway, I got to talking to Wendy and James about all their wonderful stock, which is hand-picked by Wendy and James personally. They told me that they always make a point of meeting with potential suppliers and seeing the work in action before taking on any new stock. These guys clearly have a strong sense of what and how they want their business to be perceieved and it is important to them that they have a strong relationship with their partners.

I really admire their business ethics and so was thrilled when they asked me to come up with some concepts for their logo and brand identity.

I have always enjoyed working on branding projects as there is nothing more exciting than devising and coming up with something from scratch and to see the client’s reaction to the concepts and ideas and working together to build to something that both parties are happy with. I love it when the process becomes a real collaboration between client and designer. When you bounce ideas of each other and when both parties are open to suggestions and not afraid to experiment with colour.

Wendy and James gave me a clear brief. They wanted their business to be extraordinary and to be outside of the norm. They love textures, strong bright colours and a feel of luxury and decadance. Wendy gave me a purple Quality Street sweet (still with chocolate enclosed) to use as inspiration. I wish all clients gave me chocolates to fuel my inspiration process! She also loved the Amazone BT font, but outside of that I was pretty much given free rein to let my imagination go wild.

This is the final logo, which I think they are really pleased with. I love the feeling of the modern font with the slight serif vibe and the luxurious platinum* flourish encompassing the name underneath. The purple works so well with the coolness of the silver. We did try gold tones as well, but the silver won through.

*Wendy and James made the mistake of calling the flourish ‘grey’ once and I did my ‘designer scoff’ and threatened to storm out in a hissy. Clearly it’s silver, now upgraded to platinum (I have since called it grey once and now condemed to self-imposed ‘designer timeout’ for the crime).

I am looking forward to seeing their website which is due to launch 1st September 2009 when you can buy all their goodies online.