So what's with this picture of a field?

Well, a few months back, I was thinking about some sort of corporate image/logo thing for myself. Tricky. All designers will tell you that we are our own worst clients. Anyway, I played with a couple of logo ideas. The usual designery interlocking circles, fancy typographical solutions, pictorial representations of the creative process and the like.

Then I thought: why do I need a logo? I only want a logo because everyone else has one. Moo. I know all the stuff about your logo being representative of the quality of your offerings, and all that, but I thought for me, being a designer, there should be a more original solution.

(Please note: I have nothing against designers in general having a logo - please don't write in.)

I decided I wanted a more emotional way of branding myself. How can I make people *feel* something and get a message across? That's what I wanted. Not a line-drawing of a paint-pot with some brushes next to it. No. Not for me. I'm better than that, or so I'm told.

(By he way, this is called "Thinking Outside the Box". A good thing for a designer to do, apparently. I would suggest anyone who needs to sit in a box to think shouldn't be working on your design project.)

I've lived in London for 10 years or so. It's a great city, don't get me wrong, but like most cities, it's full of buildings and cars. The chances are, if you stand outside and look directly upwards, you might see some sky. And if you stand in the street and inhale deeply...just don't do it, OK? Let's just say there's a reason you can buy little canisters of pure oxygen for the office. And frankly when I want to get out of London (which is often) I want to go and do things that I can't do in London, like look at the sky and inhale the air. Deeply.

And isn't that the best feeling ever?

So the idea was to put that on a business card. Give people a little 55x85mm piece of fresh air, blue sky, and green fields.

Choosing the picture was the kind of task that I relish: difficult, but fun. I wanted something beautiful, but not too spectacular. I didn't want a picture-postcard image of snow covered mountains. I wanted something a bit more mundane, something people in Holland might relate to.

So I searched through my photographs, which are carefully organised into colour/form categories....who am I kidding...they're all chucked in a flimsy box with one side missing. And every time I get it off the shelf they all shower down on me like multicoloured rectangular leaves.

So, sitting on the bed amongst my memories, I immediately rejected the blurry drunken pictures of someone's foot. Which is most of them, actually. But however representative it is of me as a person, it wasn't the image I wanted for my business. Call me old-fashioned, if you will. I immediately rejected the rather bathetic array of arms-length self-portraits next to unimpressive Danish monuments. Don't even go there. Basically I picked out the pictures that involved some suggestion of the outdoors.

Out of these I scanned in a few likely ones. A couple of rich scenes of a dandelion-scattered field in Hay-on-Wye, under rich clear blue sky. I could edit out my friend falling off a footbridge. But then I rejected them. Flowers aren't quite me. I wanted something more macho, more rugged, more surviving-in-the-wilderness-with-nothing-but-a-can-of-peaches-and-a-wet-sock-ish.

Finally I found it. I actually had loads of them. It was a 360° panorama scene I'd taken while staying at my uncle's house in Ireland. I think there were about a dozen photos altogether.

(Let me digress to tell those of you that haven't clicked away in boredom a little bit about my uncle and his pad. He's an English chap who went to Ireland 20-odd years ago with his ladyfriend, a small child, a cow, and a carrier bag. He bought a ruined two-room croft for a couple of hundred quid in the middle of acres upon acres of forestry land. He had a couple more kids, and while he taught himself a bit about the building trade, they lived in the croft with no electricity or running water - the toilet was a hole in the bottom of the garden, the shower was a waterfall half a mile away. They lived like this for seven years. Then my uncle used his newfound building trade to do up the house, install a water pump, electricity, gas, a toilet, a shower - all that stuff which seperates a house from a barn. And it's a great place. And I went for a visit. And I loved it. And I want to go back. But instead I'm sat here typing this rambling monologue which noone will read. Basically, I took some photos of the surrounding countryside that didn't look even one-thousandth as good as being there, on the hill, in the peaty bluster, in person.)

So anyway, I had this picture, I scanned it in, I tweaked the colours ever so slightly. It was perfect.

For the other side of my business card, I just wanted text. I wanted it to say what I did, and what I thought the distinctive qualities of my service were, and I wanted it to be snappy and memorable. I thought about it for about 15 seconds. Creative, constructive, considerate. I typed it. I thought I should mention the fact that what I did was design things. So I typed "DESIGN". I typed my name, and contact details. I lined them up on the page. I decided to partly conceal the word design, to engage the reader in a bit of synaptic activity, and explore the forms of the letters themselves. I put my details in the gap, to suggest that I was both within and part of the design process. Oh yes. And I made the background a nice warm red colour, a colour existing in nature, and at the same time, in contrast to the photo. Kind of two cards in one. This is meant to be a showcase for my talents, remember?

Here's the finished result, front and back:



The whole design process took about 5 minutes.

Sometimes it happens like that, and boy it's great when it does. It makes up for all those late nights moving a purple square one millimetre to the right, then moving it back again. FOR EIGHT HOURS.

So that's it. That's why there's a picture of a field in all my marketing materials. Actually, instead of the hour I've just spent writing this, I should have just said "Because I like it". Because it's just as true as everything else on this page. And I never for a moment thought about it being part of my surname, until it was pointed out to me later (thanks to Gem for making me slap my forehead and say "cyuh").

Anyway, I have to get back to some real work. You see, I have this problem with a purple square...