It's taken us a while but we have finally successfully commissioned a logo for Hobeck. The logo journey started a few months ago. Firstly, I was bored one evening and had a play in Adobe Photoshop. I know my way around it having used it a lot for my art. I came up with this (a logo more suited for a haulage company perhaps). This is why I am a fine artist and not a graphic designer.
A few months later, we sat together to look at my logo, we agreed that it was awful. So we came up with a rough idea of what we would like the logo to look like (and it wasn't to be the above). Interestingly, the colour scheme at this juncture was to be completely different to how it has just ended up (and, again, it wasn't to be the above). I can't remember now how we stumbled across yellow and blue for our chosen colours but we did. I think I had my artist hat on at the time and I was thinking about complementary colours.
I have three sons and my middle son, who is thirteen, is an inspiring artist, YouTuber, blogger, vlogger, film director, writer and actor (I'm not sure he knows yet what he wants to do if not all of the above). One of his passions when he's not doing his homework or playing Fortnite is messing around with Adobe software. He is quite a dab hand at Adobe Illustrator. So, I handed the baton for coming up with a logo for us over to him. Actually, I threw it gratefully at him. He grabbed it firmly with both hands and ran with it.
This is what he came up with. I'm not sure where the cat came from, but he likes cats. We have a cat: the Farmhouse Cat, Aki. The colours, as you can see, are blue and yellow. Nice, no?
We liked his offering. We liked it a lot. We especially liked the idea of the whiskers doubling up as book pages. The cat metaphor worked well too. Cats, after all, are good readers are they not? Aki, the Farmhouse Cat, is always trying to lie across whatever book I am trying to read and I am sure she can absorb information through her belly. Otherwise, why would she do it?
However, we wanted a softer-looking cat. This cat was a little too science fiction for us. We wanted a more romance suspense fiction cat. A few weeks passed us by, as they do. Then last week, in a flurry of activity, we decided to send the brief plus my son's Mark Two logo (if the haulage company effort is to be Mark One) to a friend of mine who is a very talented and well-respected professional freelance graphic designer. It turns out, this was a good decision on our part.
We asked her to 'soften' the cat and change the colours to match the website's colours. That's the gist of the brief we gave her. We wanted to allow her to add some of her own artistic flair as well. So she scurried away for a few days and returned shortly after with some offerings in her jaws. We perused her offerings. We liked them. But we didn't think we had our logo just yet. Then she scurried away for a little longer, and, in just a day or so, returned proudly with the winner. And that, our future readers and writers, is this:
It was unanimous. We loved him (or her, not sure what gender to give our cat). My son loved him too, feeling proud that he had come up with the original motif. Triple winner. Our cat speaks volumes, multi-volumes maybe. He encompasses everything we believe in: simplicity in style, friendliness in business, intelligence in everything, a sense of fun and, most importantly, really long whiskers.
We hope that our logo will become recognisable and will be remembered by our future readers' and writers' minds for all the values that we stand for: quality, nurture, family, passion for the written word and an independent spirit. It is the latter for which cats are known and it is that which we stand for in our new and exciting publishing endeavour.
So what more can I say here? Except perhaps, watch this space, dear future readers and writers, the Hobeck Cat will soon be on the prowl for new talent and he might be meowing by your door.