The Holiday Chronicles – Part I

Four weeks… well almost at least. It has gone too fast though, as always is with the case of holidays. This however is probably the first holiday when it hasn’t been a true holiday, with me seeing Wednesday and Thursday off and that’s it. My determination to do a lot of work over the holidays quickly waned as soon as I lost the Internet, but that only happened for a day or so. I knew I had work to do, and I was going to get it done. The place I knew I was going to start was to get that corporate identity finished. This was what I had planned to do after all, but I still needed to get my logo development finished off properly. Because I do a lot of work here and there and on the fly (it’s very rare I sit at my desk and do work) I constantly kept forgetting something. I’d remember my sketchbook but forget my flash drive. Remember the flash drive but forget my sketchbook. Remember both, then forget my laptop. Eventually I remembered everything and got that done.

It turns out that after messing about with my logo I decided not to change anything to it, but compartmentalise it. I settled on three versions of the logo – the text and the logo together on a green background (the original), the text on a green background, and the logo (dots) by itself. This was mainly borne out of experience of using my own logo, and I wanted to make sure that the identity I was creating was quite flexible. I was going to have to stick it onto a CD case and a CD in the end, and I wanted to make sure that by the time it came to that I could be flexible with my ideas instead of having a logo hindering me. I’ve had some experience over the last two months of working with a logo that was just unworkable, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t make the same mistake.

Next up over the holidays was the website. It was important to me that I didn’t create a design that was going to be too much of a mess-about to create in CSS, so I made sure I designed something that was workable, but also had a bit of flair about it. I’d designed the template before the holidays, so it was just a case of dropping the content in that I was going to write as I created the pages. Which is round about when I realised I’d approached things slightly the wrong way around; so off I trundled to finish the corporate identity.

When I went back and looked at my blog (before the Internet went off, early in the holidays), I’d noticed a couple of people had left comments on which they liked best, but at that point I didn’t like any. I decided to go back to my sketchbook and come up with a few more ideas to see if I could get something that I like. In the end I came up with something – and seeing as though I’d started with the business cards and built a concept from there – and I applied it to the letterhead, business card and continuation sheet. After a while I managed to get on the net and check out my blog to see if there had been more comments left, which is around about when I noticed Steve’s comment about number five being the business card.

To my dismay, I hadn’t chosen that business card.