I feel like I should be handing out cigars. Well, not quite yet ~ but maybe I oughta stock up in anticipation, as I’ve reached the final stretch of my long walk into the magical world of dragons.

It’s a good feeling when months of creating ~ revising, adding on, taking away, nurturing and bonding with creatures that somehow feel alive in your mind, made real through your hands, with paper, pen, pencil, brush and keyboard ~ finally comes together. Like carrying a child for nine months, you find you’re anxious to give birth. Like rehearsing a play, the hour comes, the curtain rises, it’s showtime. There’s relief, trepidation and confidence, all mixed in. Cigars and (more likely) flowers are shared. And we’re almost there.

Once it’s edited and packed off to press, once it’s printed and bound and shipped out to the Amazon’s and Barne’s & Noble’s of the world, it’s all very tidy looking. For any illustrated book like this, the pages show a certain level of thought and detail and complexity, but not the background steps ~ not the conjuring, the sketches, the fine-tunings, the first, second third, fourth drafts, the hundreds of decisions along the way. The “fitting in time” when there really isn’t any, which means a pretty grueling schedule. It’s quite the process…  satisfying in many ways, invigorating in others, tiring in others, and always hope that at the end of the line it will be well-received.

This will probably be my last book of this”trilogy”: mermaids, fairies, now dragons. And that’s a good place to stop. But there are other works that’ve been waiting backstage ~ stories, poetry, paintings ~ so it certainly won’t be the last of me.

For right now though, I’m off to dot those final i’s and cross the last t’s. Then my publisher will have a whack at it, and I’ll start ordering those cigars in honor of birthing more beasts and things. (Due dates to come … stay tuned!)

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I didn’t have a ready answer, except that it just sort of happens ~ ideas, concepts, visuals come to mind, which then evolve, and then get tweaked into a finished product. And while this is the truth of it, I’m sure it was highly useless to the person asking the question, especially the part where it “just sort of happens”.

If I were to try again, I’d say that the “just happening” probably comes from many years of what I’ll call research. It’s being in a business where you’re constantly aware of branding, you’re using different fonts and font combinations on a daily basis, working with shapes and colors and sizes and revolving trends. So that when you sit down to “create”, there’s all this history at your disposal. A muscle that’s been exercised regularly. You know where you can bend and stretch the limits, and you know ~ both intuitively and figuratively ~ what won’t work.

With that in mind, I have 4 rules I’ve always followed when creating a logo:

1.) Clear the head.

2.) Listen.

3.) Find emotional touchpoints and discern the personality of the business.

4.) Distill to its simplest form.

Of course within the process there’s the wonderfully muddy area where creativity swirls. Marrying concepts and tastes, the play of fonts, and the interweaving of symbols and shapes to give a visual voice to the intent of the logo: which is to be distinctive, memorable and clean, ready to leave a solid, ever-present, impression.

Here are 6 recent logos from 6 different businesses: A Non-Profit Foundation for Special Forces families, Landscaping, Real Estate Staging, E-Learning, Speech & Presentation Coaching, and Osteopathy. (I might mention that most of these presented the additional challenge of being particularly long names, which can be trickier when it comes to applying them… more on that next.)

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