Blossoming in Bristol

I recently developed a logo for the company Bristol Gardens, a fresh and stylish horticultural/landscaping business in, you guessed it, Bristol.

Bristol Gardens logo

It was a genuine pleasure to work with them. It's always nice when a client comes in with a clear and strong concept that I just help bring to the next level. It started off with the idea of paying visual homage to Bristol's shipping port history, but also, of course, gardening. Overall it needed to be professional yet a bit informal using the colours sage and slate grey.

They wanted there to be a hand-drawn quality to the logo. Design rule No 10: If you want something to look hand-drawn, draw it by hand! So, I sketched out the logo and when we decided on a concept I then carried it into illustrator and redrew it as a vector image. This allowed me to play with the bumps and jumps in the lines of the ring. I then paired the hand-drawn look with a classic font - Caslon - which is also a digital translation of something that was once hand done way back in the 1700s. I know modern post marks tend to use san-serif fonts for readability, but I wanted to firmly cement the look as 'old-school'. The whimsy of it all is in it's retro quality.

Using something as tactile and visually distinct as a postmark is  a recipe for great design. Giving the logo a hand-drawn feel made reference to the 'inkiness' of postmark. But I think it also lends itself to the idea of gardening and working with the earth. Clean lines are for slick corporate offices. You want someone down to earth and approachable who's going to get out there and literally get their hands dirty? Call these guys!

In the centre we used the Flower of Bristol - Lychnis chalcedonica (also known as Maltese Cross). Why? Well, because it's the flower of Bristol! Traditionally the flower is red but Bristol Gardens colours are sage and a slate grey. Also adding too many colours takes it away from the simple 'stamp and ink' feeling. My personal favourite part are the individual petals of the flower that are merged together as if the ink has pooled on the page. :)

Flower of Bristol

Using the stamp idea was also an opportunity to represent the logo in two forms: One as a fully realised illustration where the plant grows into the 'postage rings'. Then another version that can be used as just that, a stamp (ya'll know how I love to make my mark). This is where it's always nice to collaborate with a client. I was just happy to have the petals in the centre but the client asked for the leaves to be integrated as if we were looking at a bouquet from the top down. I think it gives the circular version of the stamp it's own identity while still clearly belonging to the larger version. This will be particularly useful for things like social media and maybe even as a watermark for invoices.

Enjoy!
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