We’ve been having an absolute blast working on some new branding for Krash Design lately. The Krash ladies and I have been talking about this for years. Thanks to the crazy quarantine – the goals of their business shifted quickly and the reasons to get this done now were inarguable.
Kristin and Ashley (Get it? Krash? So cool!) have a stamp that they’ve used for branding their products over the past couple of years. The stamped logo gets pressed onto every earring card that displays their handmade leather accessories. The challenge here: they didn’t have a digital version.
Challenge accepted, for real! I absolutely love taking something old and making it new again. We did this a while back with the Kirk Brothers Auction logo, too. The process is a bit different from what we explore when building from scratch – but the results are always awesome.
This clip shows a time lapse of my desktop as I worked through variations of the Krash logo. I started with a live trace of the original stamp from a product card. Converted to outlines and cleaned up – the rustic, stamped look really showed through. While the result was nice, I really wanted to help Krash step into a fresh new look since they were also aiming to launch a new ecommerce site.
The stamped texture wouldn’t have converted well to future uses. The grungy style often deteriorates with scale and reuse. I wanted to help them avoid that in the years to come.
So, I rebuilt the logo by hand – line by line. By drawing the logo from scratch, I was able to control the line weights and shapes. This gave me the control to add beautiful movement and flourishes to the design.
Once I adjusted all the fine details of the logo – I recreated the original text using a modern slab Google font. This decision would also allow for the team to use the same font throughout their site and marketing materials to maintain consistency.
All of the final colors, font selections and photo styling are gathered and displayed side-by-side in Krash’s new brand kit. Each element of the kit is also saved separately and delivered to the Krash team for use in their materials as needed.
That final step is an important one to me. I’ve worked in design-related fields for more than 15 years. On the very rare occasion that a company is able to give me their digital design files, it is a game changer for our processes and the costs associated. Having these logo styles, color palettes and graphics on hand to share with designers in the future is going to save Krash Design from having to ever start from scratch – truly making this a logo and brand they can build on forever.