Steph's last post reminded me that I never followed up on my previous post about branding confusion or showed you what I ended up with. Branding is much more than just your graphic images (see Umlaut's OP in
this great thread for details) but I'll stick to the images for now. Umlaut does a much better job of explaining it all than I could at this point.
I started with a vague idea of a plus size mannequin with something yarny draped across it but all of my attempts made it look like she was wearing a beauty pageant sash. They were awful. One day there was a trainwreck of an Etsy thread about branding and as a result I ended up working with the graphic designer
UmlautGraphics who brought it all together for me. Not all designers there do the same things. Many if not most appear to put banners together out of different pieces of existing art or product photos, look nice and are fairly inexpensive and others are professional graphic artists who can also create the whole package from scratch and cost a bit more. I had been feeling stuck because I thought that I had to know exactly what I wanted before anyone else could give it to me but it turns out that I didn't after all. Umlaut had a pretty interesting process where she had me make a list of likes and hates to pull inarticulate ideas out of my head. My hates (in terms of my products ) were things like cutesy cartoons, fairies and unicorns, Victorian images, hard-edged modern metal and bedazzled glitterpoop and I liked things that were more mature, sophisticated and curvy. I probably drove her crazy by calling things by the wrong name and confusing her but I absolutely love what she created for me. I have a great logo, an avatar and banner and a little ad box with my tag line for blog advertising. I developed the tag line in a thread with lots of plus size women and it was really fun. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with the logo but it's perfect to use as a banner in my new shop. So instead of having a bunch of fuzzy purple stuff I now have this great look:
She made me some beautiful business cards too but they're a pdf so I can't post them here. I'll have to go back to her to change the URL to point to my new shop when I'm ready to open but luckily I only ordered a small batch of the first run because I had the feeling that I would want to be branching out from Etsy sooner rather than later. Relatively speaking it wasn't all that expensive to use a professional, the process was fairly painless (for me, anyway - Umlaut might roll her eyes at that statement), and I'm very, very happy with the result. Unless you're very good at this sort of thing yourself I would definitely recommend letting a professional do it for you. My business name is a mouthful and not very easy to remember but my logo is unique and easily recognizable. I love my sweater girl so much that I want to stick her on everything.
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Snark of the day (I wish I could say these things without getting muted):
"No, dear, you don't make smart people laugh, you make dumb people think that they're smart".
"You want Etsy to be juried? Are you nuts? Their idea of juried art would be to make you provide a link to the Pottery Barn item that you copied".
Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com
