A logo says a lot about the kind of brand you are. At Bowhurst we put a huge amount of time and passion into creating unique hard-wearing products our followers love. So we set out to craft a logo with the same attention to detail we craft our products with.

Getting ideas on paper Although logo design has become a mostly digital proccess, it still starts in the same fashion it has for many years - the same way that our real world products do too: with sketches on a piece of paper. This is where countless ideas are created, itterated upon, thrown away, and revisted. Every desiger has their own proccess - but nothing really beats getting your fingers dirty with some pencils and pens. Sometimes the simple tools are better: they work in a coffee shop or on the train and are cheap and easy. Staying away from digital tools at this point stops the temptation of getting too focused in on refining one idea too soon. We spent a couple of weeks working on concept ideas on paper, going through almost many varients until we settled on a rough concept we liked - centered around an inverted join on the 'h' in the center of the word, and a smooth 'rise and fall' of joins through the name. Going digital No matter how skilled of an artist you are, you can only take your designs so far on paper these days.

A tablet really makes this proccess easier - it feels a bit more natural to work with a pen than a mouse. There's a lot of structure behind typography, so after the initial trace overs we drew grid lines and made sure things like visual spacings were even and the curves and ends of letters followed together. This is the point where we really started to get a feel for the logo and how it was going to look on our products. Getting out of the void A logo is, quite literally, the face of your brand. It's important that it connects with your customers, and is understandable in all contexts. With this in mind designing in a void is always bad - get as much feedback as you can - both from other designers, and from your followers. We enlisted the help of the fantastic Claire Coullon - who specialises in hand illustrated logos and fonts, and has done some amazing work over the years. She came on board as a fresh pair of eyes and gave us feedback and suggestions to improve flow and readability... When drawn or written, pen strokes that start/end in a similar fashion would naturally have similar stroke terminals. A smoother, simpler shape would fit the overall brand aims better. Once a certain shape/style is established, it should then be carried through the entire design. We used Clair's feedback and the feedback from our target users to produce several more subtle itterations of the design. It's easy to be tempted to skip this part - you can spend many hours doing small tweaks and changes. But these are the things that make your logo readable at small sizes and look natural blown-up to huge sizes. Just like product and fashion design - it really is all about the details.