After the second draft, we couldn’t wait to get the sailboat logo properly designed. Fortunately, in early April, we set an appointment with an invitation vendor. Our first meeting was like love at the first sight. We told the lady who’s doing our invite about our wedding theme and colour palette, showed her the second draft of our logo, and discussed the design of our wedding invitation. And bless her, she simply got it right :) And bless our wedding cake vendor, too, for recommending her to us.
Amazingly, it only took us 2 rounds of revision to arrive at the final logo design. Yay! I mean, I recalled my past work experience as a client to several branding consultants, and I could barely keep track of the number of revisions we had to go through. I guess, knowing what you want or at least having an idea of it really speeds things up. So, after a month of waiting, she came up with 3 variants of the logo. And with that, we officially moved from pencil-and-paper to digital era, ha!
We fell in love with the sailboat right away. The sail is truly ‘AD’ at its best! She’s transformed sketch no. 7 to a sailboat that is not only proportional, but also charming and elegant. Love, love, love how the watercolour brush strokes turn out! The wave accent is also a sweet addition to the sailboat. However, she told us that putting our names on the sailboat would look rough and abrupt due to the limited space, and would spoil the trim look of the sailboat. We agreed. So we took up her idea of adding a ribbon-styled banner with our names on it below the sailboat. That’s right, we chose the one on the left, but with the following revisions:
- We didn’t like the font with handwriting style for our names, so we asked her to change it to a more minimalist block font.
- Since we have 2 dates (4 October and 6 October, if you don’t already know :b), it would make things simpler to exclude the date from our logo.
- We wanted the logo to be uncluttered, so we didn’t fancy the addition of any other form of typography but our names. We asked her to omit ‘the marriage of’.
- Although we thought the semi circle around the sailboat was rather pointless, it did remind me of something. If there was one thing I learnt from the past branding projects I handled, it would be the following. When a brand logo has several parts to it, it is better to have a confining outer shape that holds the loose parts of the logo together. This is to allow consumers to naturally focus their attention on the logo as a whole, as a big picture, not just the typography or the shape. As a result, the message that the brand aims to communicate to consumers do not get truncated by the different elements of the logo. The consumers will be more likely to connect emotionally to the logo as a whole, which will increase the brand recognition and the brand recall. Okay, enough of branding stuff. So anyway, since we’ve got the sailboat, the wave and now the ribbon with our names on it, I wanted to have a confining outer shape that holds all of them together. I thought a full circle would be nice. Plus, it could look like a port hole, which would definitely complement the nautical look.
- The colours were partly correct. The light blue was what we wanted, but the peach looked way too pink to our liking. Also, we decided to have our names in cream instead of white. Peach, light blue and cream are our wedding colours, with peach as a common colour across the 2 wedding receptions. I’m absolutely going to dedicate one whole post to talk about the wedding colours in great details soon!
And for sure, we were so excited when we received the revised logo :D
When we saw it, we knew we were almost there! The peach colour is so much better and we like the new font. The circle does contain the logo elements perfectly even though the port hole idea didn’t really make it to the design. I got the idea of the circle from the nautical spread featured in ‘Her World – BRIDES’ magazine which is by the way, the one and only bridal magazine I’ve had so far. Anyway, I reckoned the banner would capture most of the attention since it is in the only part with solid colour, as shown in the logo on the left. So I guess it’s kind of a reversed psychology to make our initials (the sail) stand out instead. I realised the only thing which would highlight our initials was not the lack of colour on the rest of the logo, but the opposite. So we chose the logo on the right, with a couple of final touches. I requested for our names to be bold and the circle to be in peach-blue instead of white-blue. And with that, we’ve finally come to our final wedding logo that we love so, so much! :))
Quite a journey, isn’t it? :) I know it might be silly to give so much thought and go through all of these just for a wedding monogram/logo, but I don’t know, for me it feels incredibly rewarding and meaningful. I think every bride-t0-be focuses on different element of a wedding. Some insist on wearing only designer wedding dress, some travel half around the world for their pre-wedding photos, but some other like me simply cares a little too much on the design aspect of the wedding. To be honest, it sometimes feels like doing a real branding project! Well perhaps, I’m influenced by my previous work to a certain extent, and without me realising, I’ve taken up this whole wedding project as I did those branding ones. At some point, I felt that I was overdoing and over-thinking it, but well, it’s comforting to know that there is indeed such a thing called wedding brand! And ours, it happens to be a sailboat :)