Snow Country Gardens

I had the pleasure of working with Hans and Tamara who own Snow Country Gardens to develop their company's logo and branding. They were a lot of fun to work with and provided great feedback which really helped in the end result.

They knew that they wanted their iconic Wild Rose 1947 Ford truck in the logo in a circular format and wanted an heirloom tomato to be incorporated into the design. We ended up with the outline of an heirloom tomato framing the truck and hint of the fields and mountains in the distance. I look forward to seeing their logo around the valley in the months to come.

This is a great case study of my logo creation process. I try to start broad when I am in the sketch stage and explore concepts that the client has thought of and that they haven't thought of. This is a really valuable step as there are ideas that we can just cross off the list, others that we can pursue further, and borrow from other trains of thought to improve another idea. The four main ideas I pursued with the Snow Country Gardens logo were, automotive, circular, road dust, and heirloom border.

After deciding on the truck with the heirloom tomato border, we could then focus on more specific design elements and experiment with them when bringing the sketch into Adobe Illustrator. The shape of the heirloom was very important. It needed to read 'heirloom' yet not look like a pumpkin. There were several iterations on this. The size of the truck relative to the tomato was important as well as well as capturing key details of the truck without getting too busy. The grill was important as well as the wood rails.

After getting all these elements dialed in, I could then focus on the font. We knew we needed a san serif font. The choice needed to be modern yet timeless. The 'oxygen' font fit the bill nicely. I wanted to explore the possibility of color after we had the logo looking great in black and white. I used the colors of the 1947 ford as inspiration. The tomato red was very important as it had to look like an heirloom red rather than the fire engine red of the standard tomato. We arrived at a darker wine red color which is very classic and reads as heirloom.

In creating the branding sheets with color values and font, I showed how the logo would look reversed out in white and lighter colors on a dark background. These looked really sharp so I gave the clients these files as well. I saved out jpgs and pngs for the client in a variety of sizes so they could quickly get the logo on their site, t-shirts and other marketing materials.

All clients receive a thumb drive with the Illustrator source art, various sized jpgs and pngs, jpgs of sketches and comps, and font files. Having access to the source art is a big bonus as the client can export the artwork even at billboard size and it would still be sharp as it would be on a business card.