No Miami Ink, Just Petaluma Ink Jet

It’s been suggested that I go into tattooing. This is as close as I get. If I’ve designed your logo and you’d like to try it out as a tattoo, I’ll happily ink on THIS bicep. Otherwise, the best I can offer is to put your logo on some flash to take to your local parlor or size it down for THESE. Sorry, I just don’t do needles.

Logo Cookies

It’s not too early to start thinking about the holidays. How delicious of an idea is this? Rolling Pin Productions will decorate cookies with your logo for corporate events, parties or gifts. They even offer photos cookies. Yum! (Photo courtesy of Rolling Pin Productions)

Recent Logo Designs

It’s been a busy summer! Here are a few recent designs that have yet to make my online portfolio.

Sweet Papery is a charming online store that specializes in unique custom rubber stamps and labels.

Desirai Labrada of Lucid Dream Designs is a fabulous web designer that I have had the privilege of working with on a few projects. She also has an Etsy shop designing and selling stationery, cards and more.

Organized Fishing offers a variety of innovative fishing organization products beautifully executed in natural woods as well as other storage solutions.
HomeGreenSolutions.com is an online store offering earth-friendly home, garden and pet product solutions for a safe and healthy environment.

Marina Meats, San Francisco

Marina Meats of San Francisco is the new meat market just down the street from its old location inside Marina Super. A beautiful expansion deserved a beautiful new identity and store front design. Having done both, I was also able to update the look of Marina Super’s image.

Joey Gandolfo, one of the proud owners and butcher of this wonderful store, is the latest of several past generations of his family to provide meat, poultry and fish to the Marina District of San Francisco, located in the neighborhood he grew up in. The store site went through quite a transition before Marina Meats moved in, and the results are amazing.

I worked primarily with Sandy Gandolfo, his wife, on creating this exciting new logo and storefront design. Just another example that you CAN successfully work with family...Sandy is my husband’s first cousin.


Please visit Marina Meats’ website for a very cool virtual tour!

On thy grave
the rain shall fall
from the eyes
of a mighty
nation.

Thomas William Parsons

CLIENT PROFILE: Azz & Bzz Apparel

Baby Apparel. How fun is that?

Aubrey Baratta, a dynamic young mother in Sonoma, California, commisioned me to not only design logos for her company and new line of apparel, but also to illustrate the images to be printed on them. Here a few pieces from her first line. (Can you guess my favorite image?)


You will find her hang tags in my post about turning business cards into tags.

Watch for Azz & Bzz Apparel in childrens’ boutiques soon.
To contact Aubrey, visit her website, Azz & Bzz Apparel.

CLIENT PROFILE: Van Leeuwen Ice Cream

Word of mouth logo design, you can’t beat it.

Ben Van Leeuwen contacted me for logo design back in March as he was in the beginning stages of a wonderful new concept: Artisan ice cream from a truck, with his first big launch in Brooklyn, NY. And to show you just how unique his product and business is, this is an exerpt from his creative brief:

“To give you an idea of the product, we use hormone free milk and cream from small family farms in New York State, cane sugar and egg yolks. We never use milk powder, corn syrup, stabilizers, or preservatives. We age organic Bourbon and Tahitian Vanilla Beans in oak barrels with vodka for 4 months to extract them. We use pure Sicilian Pistachios, hand picked by small family farmers on the slopes of Mount Etna in Bronte. We use Tonda La gentile origin certified Hazelnuts from Piedmont. We source our chocolate from Michel Cluizel in France( they use no Soya Lechitin!). We use Quinn Farms Hudson Valley red currants. We have set out to make the best readily available super-premium ice cream while also educating consumers on why slow food produced ingredients taste better.”

For additional photo and more on Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, click here and here!

Visit the website: Van Leeuwen Ice Cream

OvernightPrints.com

It’s a rare day when I hand my business card to someone and don’t get a great response. Usually, it’s a response over the pick-up truck, but I think my card carries weight for more than design, but also for actual weight.
I discovered overnightprints.com a few years ago and since then have had many of my clients’ business cards printed through them.

The photos show a few examples of business cards I’ve designed and had printed through ONP. They include one and two-sided business cards, cards as hang tags and mini price tags (one card sliced and hole-punched.) All created and printed as actual business card files.

Here are a few good reasons why I continue to use and recommend overnightprints.com:

1. Price. You can’t beat the price for the quality. Understand this is not offset printing, it is digital. I don’t know how many other business cards from around the world are being printed on the same piece of stock as mine at the same time, but I am sure it’s quite a few. Therefor, actual printing may on occasion suffer from lack of good color correction, making it sometimes hard to match your first batch of 500 cards to your second printed 6 months later, but with most of my clients restricted to very limited start-up budgets, it’s a small sacrifice. There have been only a few times, maybe 5%, that I have had to request a reprint. It has NEVER been a problem. And, ONP is almost always running a promotion of one kind or another, usually equal to about $10 off your order.

2. Two-sided printing, and full bleed artwork- again for the price, can’t be beat.

3. Card stock. Beefy. I love this ultra smooth, satin heavy stock. It is one of the heaviest business cards you will ever hold in your hand, sans cardboard.

4. Rounded corners. Perfect for a unique look or for apparel hang tags. For large quantitiy hang tags, I have a local printer drill holes in preprinted cards for around $10/1000. Otherwise, a small hole punch and a glass of wine will get you through a couple hundred on your own. Occasionally, I design hang tags with a faux perforation using a dotted line.

5. UV coating. Seriously waterproof-looking varnish...when you need it. The UV coating can be isolated to specific graphics on your card for a cool effect, but one I’ve yet to try.

6. Ease of ordering. Well for me anyway. I’ve got the file set-up down after all this time and re-ordering cards is crazy easy. Oh, and PayPal, gotta love PP.

Visual Inspiration

I draw inspiration from many places when designing logos, such as the internet, but one place I go to the most is my own reference library. I have been building this library for many, many years and am quite proud of it. It currently takes up one entire wall of our living room with overflow in my shed. I have an enormous clip art library (Bottom and middle 2 shelves to the far right) of which I use for some base illustrations, (always modifying into custom art.) The bottom shelf holds the vintage printer clips, art catalogs and other miscellaneous vintage art reference. The top right is my collection of rare sign-painter books. Signpainters were the original graphic designers. Their work showcased in these books would knock your socks off.

Gathering inspiration from the past as well as from current works, I usually sit in my most comfortable chair with post-its, a rollerball pen and a sketchbook for hours thumb-nailing ideas before ever sitting behind the wheel (monitor). I have been hoarding a large selection of the most current reference books on Logo design and related works. Trends are important to follow as well as create.

About 8 of the graphic design books and design annuals on my shelves feature my very own designs chosen for publication.

So remember, if you find I’m not responding quickly enough to an email, there’s a good chance I’m buried in beautiful books and post-it notes.

Self Diagnosis = OCG

All the obvious symptoms lead me to believe that I was clearly born with an overactive creative gland. That might sound like bragging, but I’m serious when I say it keeps me up at night. More ideas than time. Work vs. hobby. Create one-of-a-kinds or mass produce?

The one thing that keeps my OCG running smooth is logo design. Switching it up. Focusing my (at-home) career on logo design has been extremely stimulating for the simple fact that my client base is so diverse. Logos from Pest Control to Baby Apparel. Kettlebell Training to Nail Salon. Poker Apparel to Home Bakers. Oil & Gas Company to Antique Store. IT Company to Elementary School. You get the idea. All with the added bonuses of not only great people to work for, but the thrill of helping create an identity for a first-time business owner.