The Jade Hylton Empire has been BRANDED!

I finally did it! I designed my own logo. Designing your own logo as a graphic designer or artist yourself can be a really tricky task, you want it to represent your work, want it to be neat, be impactful, it needs to work on many different scales, whether it be to stamp finished work or head your invoices. Ideas spark, and you put it on to paper, you work on it and it ages before your eyes, becomes the work of an adolescent, screams of inexperience; a talentless fraud… it’s really hard!

I had been designing my logo in my head for years, whilst designing clients’ in a matter of days or weeks. Finally I decided to take the plunge and get something down on paper. I got my graph paper out and did a preliminary – very boxy – drawing. Once I finished, I pinned it on my cork board above my desk and stared at it for about 8 weeks. As I walked in and out of my living room and caught it in the corner of my eye, the back of my mind started moving parts around and softening edges, reconstructing and comparing.

Coming from being a collage artist, which was my first art practice back in college, I can be quite a busy designer, a “maximilist”; I can crowd my work and it can look like an explosion of ideas, which sort of turned into my career, not the collage part, but the explosion of ideas. After being in my 3rd year of self-employment I was knighted with the slogan ‘Doing it all, all the time’. So I initially wanted to incorporate all the types of art I practice and offer as an artist; life modelling, life drawing classes, photography, digital media design, graphic design, virtual assistance, creative advisor, the list goes on… As I placed a silhouette of a body hanging off the ‘J’ and a camera placed in the 90 degree angle of the ‘H’ … I just had to scrap it all, it got too overwhelming and, really knowing myself – as much as anyone can in their 30’s – I know that things could change any moment, my passions, my drive, my location, so I went back to my original sketch and started to move things around in my minds eye with a more simple approach.

Once in photoshop, I started working on creating the individual parts. I used the rectangle tool to make the top left hand part of the ‘H’ first, this was going to be replicated to create the other smaller parts of the ‘H’ as well as be the frame for making sure the width was the same measurements in the whole of the design. That same shape will also be duplicated and used as the ends of the line across the top of ‘J’. Once I create the ‘H’, the top part of the ‘J’ and the vertical line of the ‘J’, I now had to figure out how I was going to create the tail. I tried out a few different things, because tilting/rotating the shapes I had made to create the rest of the design, just wasn’t working, the degree made it too wide or too close. So I had to make it separately from the original shape I created to manipulate for the whole design. I had to create a curved tail, it continued the feel of the design as a whole, I created this using multiple circle shapes and then using the original shape I was working around to create the end of the tail.

It took me about 3 hours to complete the digital design. Once I finished it, I added a box around it with a smaller version in red in the corner. This – I feel – gives it that look of an authentication stamp, and/or a Chinese good luck symbol. I was finished and I was overjoyed with the final design. I really like how it looks like its own character, as well as being clean and simple with the smaller red logo detail.

I don’t do logo designs as a service anymore as it’s incredibly stressful, but if you offer me enough money, we can talk… additionally, if you like my design style and would like to talk about any other services, please check out my packages on the services page.