Valentia Productions
About
I met Lena Crocker, owner of Valentia Productions at my local Rising Tide Tuesdays Together meetup. She is a young creative entrepreneur with a vision. She wanted to elevate her successful wedding photography startup to attract higher paying clients, as well as pivot her focus to do more boudoir photography. She wanted a logo and website that would reflect her artistic sensibilities and help guide visitors to find the content that would help them become clients.
Services
Logo Design
Branding
Website Design
Main Logo
Creative Brief
When I met Lena, she had already built a strong reputation by providing strong creative vision, and excellent customer service to her clients. She had great ratings on The Knot, and tons of word of mouth referrals. We wanted to build on her existing brand recognition by developing a new logo that paid homage to her existing one. Lena’s starter logo featured a calligraphic display font and a hand-painted mountain that had been created by a dear friend. During our first consultation, we agreed that a mountain was a strong visual element that would connect with her target audience, and that the word mark needed to be more legible, and look more sophisticated.
My first task was to work on the word mark. These are some of the options I showed her that floated to the top. I kept the mark all lower case, and used a couple of script fonts with crisper lines, that still had the feel of strokes made with a calligrapher’s pen. We studied and discussed the small variations in the letter forms, and the connecting strokes, and agreed on which ones we preferred, and thought would work best for the final product.
Starting with letter forms and connecting strokes from two different fonts, I tweaked the points and curves to sculpt the logo into it’s final form. Here are some of the key changes I made:
1. Because the letter v is the brand’s initial, I wanted to open it up so it was unmistakable.
2. The n needed the height and thickness to be adapted to look like it belonged with the other letters.
3. I created a letter t the same height as the letter l, with no loop, and a crossbar that left room for the dot over the i.
4. I enlarged the dot over the i and made sure that the connector to the a was nice and smooth.
Next, it was time to work on the mountain shape, and the color palette. I always create mood boards like the ones above when working with clients, in order to establish a shared visual language. It helps so much in communicating our design ideas and preferences, and the final result is not a complete surprise. We looked at several different illustration styles for mountains, and how they could be incorporated into the Valentia logo layout.
The mountain illustrations with shading seemed the most appealing, and versatile, so I created some mountain sketches both in pencil, and in vector form. This wasn’t my first time drawing a mountain illustration for a logo, but I definitely learned a lot more this time around about simplifying the shapes, and how to make the overall image impactful at a variety of sizes. The one on the right was largely based on photos of Mt Hood, which is a Pacific Northwest icon.
Ultimately, we landed on a a simple outline, filled with a moody, green, watercolor pattern that I sourced from Creative Market. This along with the customized script word mark, communicates the artistic hand-crafted aspect of Lena’s photography.
Color Palette
All that was left to do to wrap up the brand style guide was to define the color palette and typography. During our consultation, we came across another photographer’s site that made use of a light-weight script to highlight some key words in the copy. We wanted to borrow that idea, and so we found Reman, a monoline script that has a hand writing feel. It paired nicely with Montserrat, which is a clean, modern geometric typeface and has a wide variety of weights and styles available.
Website
Lena’s original site had a lot of great content, but since it didn’t have a strong home page, it was getting lost. Like most photographers, she had tons of gorgeous photography, she also had lots of blog posts where she shared her creative process, and her passion for creating memorable experiences for her clients. Now that we had strong graphics that complimented her photography, it was time to re-organize her content to design an impactful home page, that was worthy of her work, and helped guide clients to the newly refined services she offers.
Behold…
Starting with the Foster template on Squarespace, I used a healthy amount of custom code to accomplish the styling - including the inline keywords using the Reman Script font, and a new pricing page that replaced an uploaded PDF document, that was awkward and hard to read on mobile devices.
Now her website looks and functions beautifully on every device, and Lena has been able to build her business, working fewer hours, and making more money because her clients don’t bat an eye at her higher prices.
“Brandy is very talented not only in graphic design but also in diving deeper into what makes each brand special. She took the time to really understand my business which made my new logo and branding so much more than a new look! There is now an improved purpose behind my brand, which is so exciting. She has a brilliant eye for web design and logo creation.”
Ready to take your business to the next level with custom branding and web design? Let’s talk! Apply for a free project evaluation, and get ready to tell me all your branding hopes and dreams.