Working Designer Wednesday: Designing A Logo

How lucky can a blogging girl get? Kate from Floret Cadet has agreed to join us again today and share her advice on designing a logo. So much valuable information…thanks, Kate!

Logo

After you name your baby, you will need a logo! Obviously, you can hire a well established, corporate graphic design or branding firm to design a logo for you, but for someone just starting out on their own, that might not make financial sense. I think it’s important to have a unique logo that you love and will want to use for the foreseeable future, and again, I learned this the hard way- my year 1 Floret Cadet logo was a word document that I created with a free font and then took a screenshot of to make into a JPEG! There are some great options out there that are a huge step up from the DIY-without-the-proper-software route I initially took, even if you are on a very tight start up budget.

Chic Custom Logos For A Reasonable Rate

I later found a whole community of graphic designers who can custom design logos, blog graphics, and marketing collateral in packages for very reasonable rates. Many of them have a presence on Etsy.

Sage Wedding Pros is a great branding and business resource, and many of their advertisers and editorial contributors are boutique design and branding firms aimed at small business start ups.

I used Prophoto for by blog design / template, and I found that a lot of the designers doing prophoto template design also offer branding packages and one of a kind logo designs. Some of them were: Swoone, Seaside Creative, and Mindy Young Design. (A general note: a lot of marketing/ branding services and products tailored towards photographers are very transferrable to floral designers, which makes sense - a major purpose of your website and blog is to showcase professional quality photos of your work (even if you didn’t take them), and like photographers, lots of floral designers are sole proprietorships and involved in the wedding sector.)

And of course, getting a recommendation from someone whose logo you love is always another great way to find the right designer for your brand!

Working With A Custom Logo Designer

You will want to approach a prospective designer with at least some idea of a style you are going for, and whether you want a type based or image based logo. Some examples / inspiration for type based logos are here, and there are also lots of general logo design inspiration galleries online, many of whom have ads by logo designers who charge reasonable rates.

If you don’t know exactly what you want, I think that the best starting point for a conversation with a designer would be a few example pictures of logos that you like (or don’t like), a few fonts that you like (or don’t like), and a few kinds of shapes or images that you like (or don’t like). It’s very fun to browse fonts at Veer, and Shutterstock has a huge gallery of vector drawings that can be inspirational.

Pre-made Logos

If you don’t have the budget for a custom route with one of these types of designers who caters to small businesses, another discovery of mine was that many of the same designers offer pre-made logos that are *very* inexpensive. You will definitely want a logo that is unique to you, but most of the pre-mades are sold as exclusives, meaning that they are sold once with your business name added, and then not offered again. Designers sometimes use “OOAK” as shorthand for these offerings, meaning “one of a kind.”

Here are some of the pre-made logos that I happened to come across in a search today, and like for a floral design business– most of them are one of a kind, so would never be reused, and designers will let you change colors or fonts. I’d be proud to sport any one of these! Images are linked to their sources…

That’s it! Hope this post was helpful. I pinned lots of logos, blog graphics, designers, blog templates, and other marketing stuff on this board while I was shopping around for a logo and blog design, so please feel free to peruse for more ideas!

So many links that are brand new to me!  I find it refreshing that Kate is so generous with the information she obviously spent countless hours researching. She is one of the designers I am beginning to refer to as the “caring bunch”…those are the designers who care deeply about their profession as an art form and want to share their experiences with other designers without worrying about competition…simply because they care…about flowers and about people.

Be sure to join us again next Wednesday. Kate will give you some pointers on finding your niche as a floral designer. Happy Wednesday!

 

The Key To My Heart

I love this bouquet created by my sweet friend Liz at Fleurology and photographed by Deyla Huss…

…in fact, I love it so much that it inspired a whole post!

image via Love ‘n Fresh Flowers

image via Clayton Austin Photography

image via Birch Blooms and Melissa Schollaert Photography

image via Brandon Kidd Photography

image via Tricia Fountaine Design

image Clayton Austin Photography

image via Fleurology

image via Adrienne Gunde Photography

image Amy Burke Designs and Caroline Tran Photography

image via Jesi Haack Weddings

image via Fleurology

image via Simply Bloom Photography

Thanks for the inspiration, Liz!

your woman

Nearing 15 years and I still love this song...

Bouquets For Purple Bridesmaids’ Dresses

image via Chestnuts in the Tuileries

image via Bella Flora 

image via Hana Floral Design

image via Clementine Posy

image via White Lilac Inc. and Samuel Lippke Photography

image via Petalena and Lexi Photography

image via Modern Bouquet

image via Holly Heider Chapple Flowers

image via April Flowers

image via Mondo Floral Design and Karen Buckle Photography

image via Jamie Delaine Photography

image via Mondo Floral Design

image via Pollen Floral Art

Happy Monday!

 

Which Bouquet?

The Dress…

…from Elie Saab…try to ignore the Barbie doll leg protruding from the dress just long enough to pick a bouquet…and, no, I don’t understand what type of undergarment you might choose for the lower half of this dress…but the color and flowing silhouette have me mesmerized…

The Bouquets…

Bouquet #1(Erin Volante Floral)

Bouquet #2 (Heavenly Blooms)

Bouquet #3 (Floral Verde)

Bouquet #4 (Flowers by Carolyn)

Bouquet #5 (Art With Nature)

Which would you choose?

Thanks so much for stopping by this week and leaving comments. You make it so much fun to write this blog! Have a great weekend!

P.S. Congratulations to a fabulous designer, Carissa from JL Designs, on the birth of her sweet baby boy!

British Love

It all started with this sofa & ottoman…

image via Bloom by Anuschka

…and my love grew…

image via Heather Bullard

image via Miss Pickering

image via Miss Pickering

image via Denise Fasanello

image via Denise Fasanello

image via CBS News

Happy Thursday!

 

Working Designer Wednesday: Naming Your Floral Design Business

I’m so excited about today’s post. Kate from Floret Cadet has become a sweet blogging friend and she recently began transitioning her hobby into a floral design business. She’s been busy choosing business cards and basic studio equipment, creating a new web presence, finding a logo designer and creating a logo…and she has generously offered to share what she’s learned with the Botanical Brouhaha readers! Today she’s sharing her thoughts on naming your new floral design business, which she so appropriately refers to as your “baby”…Welcome, Kate…

Tips for Naming Your New Baby

• Name the business you want to be, not the business you are.  Once you establish a business, it’s not an easy process to change the name- it would be almost tantamount to starting from scratch.  So think ahead to the future.  For example, naming a business “Weddings By Kate” would not be savvy if you ultimately want to add lots of non wedding events to your roster, and naming a business “Fabulous Flowers” would not be smart if you ultimately might want to branch out into overall event production or décor.  This one hits close to home, because the name “Floret Cadet” was chosen just for a blog about floral design from a fan’s perspective, not for a floral design business.  I did later choose to stick with it for my business, but the word “Cadet” implies someone in training, which isn’t necessarily apropos.  I decided that I like the idea and message that I’m always learning and growing, and I just came to love and identify with the name, but I definitely wasn’t thinking ahead.

• Lots of florists incorporate names of specific flowers into their business names (I have noticed a lot in particular with Rose, Lilac, Lily or Lotus in the names).  I think this is great if you are passionate about that type of flower or really identify with it.  If a customer happens to hate that particular type of flower, they might have a negative impression of the business on first glance, but I don’t think it’s a huge risk if there’s a flower you really want to hang your hat on- people are certainly smart enough to know it's not the only flower you like to work with!  If you don’t want to include a specific flower type, there are lots of botanical words that aren’t specific flower varieties to also consider – names with branch, stem, botanical, organic, twig, vine, etc. can be lovely, as can other evocative words like garden or vase. 

• If you want your business to have a specific cultural flair, or are just looking for another word for ‘flower’ that isn’t as common, the word is lovely (and still recognizable) in many other languages.  Fleur, Fiore, Flor, Bloem, and their cousins can make for distinctive business names.   Even if the name isn’t recognizable to most Americans as a flower word, a foreign word for flowers or a type of flower can still make a beautiful name.  My friend Olga named her business Landish Studio, which is the Russian word for Lily of the Valley (she is Russian-American).  Her logo also features a lily of the valley icon, further forging the connection.  As long as people can pronounce it, it’s fun to have a back story to your name that isn’t immediately obvious.  Which brings me to the next point…

image via Landish Studio

• As with baby names, it makes sense to think about whether the average consumer can pronounce or spell your business name (again, I learned this through experience, because everyone under the sun wants to type or say Floral Cadet rather than Floret Cadet!)  It’s great for a name to have a certain mystique, but you don’t want to spend lots of time and energy educating people about how to spit it out.  Having been a recent floral consumer myself, I will also add that people find a business intimidating if they’re not sure how to pronounce it.  They avoid saying it out loud for fear of being wrong or looking silly (at least I did!)

 

• It’s also common to use your name as the business name.  You don’t have to register a DBA (“doing business as” or an aka) if you use your first and last name (i.e. Kate Johnston Floral Design), and it’s very straightforward.   I come from a PR background and have seen lots of situations with boutique firms named after the founder where the name eventually became a burden however.  If a customer hires Kate Johnston Floral Design, they might expect (or at least hope) to always and only deal with Kate Johnston.  If you expand and wind up with a team of associate designers or even one trusty assistant to handle some client correspondence, you might have different demands on your time than you would if your company name wasn't personal.   This said, obviously there are many successful and beloved floral design companies that use teams of designers that are named this way, so it can definitely work well! (Holly Chapple Flowers comes to mind as do many others!)

image via Holly Heider Chapple Flowers

• I think that it can be smart to include your city name in the business name (i.e. Stems of Dallas).  In the age of the blogosphere, potential customers see work from around the country every day, and it can actually be difficult to figure out where the business is based if it’s not clearly stated on their home page.  I have had to look up zip codes and area codes before to figure out where florists are based!  The potential down side of this is that obviously sometimes floral designers end up moving, and if you did, your business name wouldn’t be transferable (though you'd need to build a new client base anyhow).

image via Stems of Dallas

• If you are stuck for ideas, think of things that really inspire you- they don't have to be floral.  I’ve seen really great floral design company names that hinged on or were inspired by foods, colors, places, seasons, people, etc- there’s Celadon & Celery, Geranium Lake (which is a specific color of oil paint, chosen by a painter turned florist),Honey and Poppies (which also sounds floral but was named after the owner’s beloved grandparents, Honey and Papi), The Monkey Flower Group and the list goes on and on!

image via Celadon & Celery Events

image via Geranium Lake

image via Honey and Poppies

image via The Monkey Flower Group

• This is a semi-cynical one, but hey, business is business, so you might want to consider that if you pick a business name that starts with a letter that appears early in the alphabet, you will appear first on blogrolls, in alphabetized vendor directories, etc.  Looking at my own blogroll, there is a huge bottleneck around businesses that start with the letter "F," because obviously a lot of flower business owners start their names with Floral, Flower, Flora, and other related words.  It's not necessarily a problem, but if you're looking to differentiate yourself you might want to go against the grain here, and starting your business name with an early letter will also assure you're at the top of alphabetized lists!

What are some of your favorite floral design company names?

Thanks so much, Kate! Next Wednesday, Kate will be back on BB to give us pointers on creating a logo…she’ll discuss working with a  custom logo designer, finding a custom logo at a reasonable rate and using a pre-made logo. You will love that post! She will provide you with numerous resources to help in creating or redesigning your logo. I encourage you to check out Kate’s blog, Floret Cadet, if you aren’t already acquainted with her!

Have a great Wednesday!