During the summer I was asked by the good people at BetleyWhiteHorne, a design company on the island of Guernsey, to have a crack at an icon they had been having trouble with.
The mark was part of a new logo for the Guernsey Community Foundation and they wanted it to represent the Guernsey lilly flower. After receiving some reference material and a good chat with Piet Whitehorne, the creative director, I got my trusty brush pen out and set about a process of breaking down the aspects of the flower to create a mark as simple and graphic as possible.
I started by looking at the flower and working out a way to reflect it successfully. The first piece was a pretty realistic representation.
This approach was clearly too complicated and we felt it could probably loose the stems and I could try repeating parts so the overall effect was more graphic. I personally liked the idea of using shadow to define the features but I agreed with the team that it would probably be more practical if it wasn't defined this way. I did work up a final attempt to see if I could make it work and settle any unease, but it became apparent that we could make something with more impact and presence if that approach was ditched.
The next step was to try and break it down further, whilst retaining the characteristics of the Guernsey Lilly.
The step above seemed to be moving in the right direction with the shape but it was loosing petal definition, with the left and right sides getting a out of shape and overly complicated. The whole piece was blending into itself too much, the next step needed to address this.
Now we had more distinct aspects to the mark but parts were squashed and looking a little clumsy. It didn't knit together very well. The next step was to try and equal it out and get the relationship between each petal working well.
Now I was really starting to get somewhere. My next move was to thin out some of the stalks, create more consistency with the petals, and fix a few more spacing issues.
At this stage it felt close to mission accomplished so it was time to move on to the computer and get it vectorised. During this faze I added a couple of new features to the tips to add an extra element of detail and the petals got smoothed out and crisp.
We were now very close to having it all wrapped up. Some more adjustments needed to be made in order for the mark to work well at a smaller size. The version at this stage, once shrunk down, starts to loose a lot of its definition. If printed, it may have had some problems. I needed to create more space to give each aspect more breathing room.
With one final adjustment to bring the central petals more in balance with their surroundings I was all set to bring in the colouring up idea I had. With that in place the job was all wrapped up. Happy days!
