Featured Project: Rancho Puma
Late last year, we were contacted by a fellow Pennsylvanian (well, we were still Pennsylvanians at the time) via our Etsy shop with a new-to-us logo request: design a retro, lounge-style logo for a home that didn’t yet exist.
Brief
The client and her family were searching for the perfect vacation home in sunny California. Daydreams and plans led to a name and a decorating scheme, and they wanted to surprise a family member with notepads, towels, etc. personalized with the vacation home’s signature feel. The client’s initial concept was for a highly detailed, illustrated logo with multiple elements. To keep costs down, and to maximize suitability for embroidery and screenprinting, we worked with the client to create a simplified logo that maintained the relaxing-with-a-martini, retro lounge feel that they desired.
Design
After a few preliminary sketches, I headed straight for our font library. I played with a wide variety of retro fonts (boy howdy, do I love Font Diner) to create a number of electrodoodles inspired by drive-in movie signs, refrigerator emblems, hotels in Wildwood, NJ, retro geometry, and the shows I watched on TV Land as a kid (back when TV Land was still Nick at Nite. Hell, back when Nick at Nite was just, yanno, nighttime programming on Nickelodeon.) In the end, I presented three concepts:
The bottom “bracketed” logo breaks all the damn rules. It’s hard to read. It wouldn’t embroider well. It’s hard to read. (Yes, that’s worth mentioning twice.) It’s still my favorite of the three, maybe because it looks like it should be the sign for a smoky underground lounge.
The center logo is sweet and saucy retro with a bit of slinky feline impact. Donna Reed meets Julie Newmar, if you will.
A variation of the top logo concept, with a splash of color, became the final logo, shown at the beginning of this post.
Dani made this mess on July 10th, 2010 and filed it under Projects