Designing logos is one of my favourite things to do and I must admit without any arrogance that I usually find it quite a relatively smooth process. All brain cells are firing, thinking about Type, colour, layout etc, so when the brief for Forever Florist was given in class, I was literally stumped for ideas. Having designed a logo that met the requirements, I sat back and took a hard look at what I had done and realised with shame that I had broken a few of my own cardinal rules:

• I promised myself when starting the course that I would always treat every assignment as if I was employed, the quality of the design was to be the best that I could do, ( even as a novice with so much to learn) I would treat it as if my mortgage and my reputation depended on it.

• Always design with intent. If no inspiration came from the original brief, the name of the product, the client ,whatever, I would make one of my own. Having a vested interest in something always pushes you to accomplish more, so with that in mind my designs would always hold a respect that I give myself.

So after mulling things over for a while I decided I wanted to use Bodoni type, with the colours red and black. The inspiration comes from a fairly old video by Queens of the Stoneage, "Go With The Flow" ( Songs for the Deaf, 1992) but if you haven't seen it check it out at http://www.qotsa.com/ Personally, I think it is the best video ever made, seriously. I'm not sure whether my design works, no excuses here but trying to work with a killer headache really does make me want to ignore everything I said in the above.

In the last design I kept in mind the reason we buy flowers, with a basic "memory ribbon" added, I didn't attache any specific colour to the ribbon but rather let someone else visualise what it meant to them. I also didn't want it to be too sombre. Working with a solid block of colour limits the amount of colours used , so I kept to a clean white.
draft