Surprise! We’re Rebranding!
Over the last few months, we’ve become more and more unhappy with our current logo. It is cute, for sure, but it doesn’t always work well with the graphics we create. Sometimes it’s too busy with having several colors, or it’s just hard to read because the lettering is so thin. We always work around it the best we can, but that only works for so long before it’s time to start trying to fix the problem instead of running around it.
When we first started Sage & Oak, we’ll be honest - we kind of rushed our branding. That wasn’t the best decision on our part, we know, but our original logo wasn’t horrible. It just didn’t always work as well as we would have liked. We were too excited to start over in the branding department so we just went with it. We wanted to get our name out there as quickly as possible and we did.
The first logo idea we designed that, when together, we liked, we went with it. That was almost a year and a half ago, and over time, our style has been more defined and we wanted to show that with our brand identity. After a few months of using our first logo, we became unhappy with it and decided that change was needed. We wanted our newer products to match our personalities even if it meant having to rebrand already. This is where our current logo comes in. The really cute one with the cursive font and flowers, yeah. You know the one.
For those that don’t know, rebranding is basically where we will strip our social media accounts and our website of our old logo and replace it with the new and improved version we came up with. There’s a lot more to it than this, that’s for sure, but today we’ll keep it simple for you. You don’t need to worry about the more complicated things, that’s our problem. Unless you want to know… If you do, then read on!
The first step in rebranding was to sit down and figure out what we needed in our new logo and what we could do to improve it so it better suits us.
We came up with a few sketches on paper before we took them to our computer for design. It’s always important to have some kind of draft before you bring your ideas to life because, while computers are good for editing ideas and getting them out into the world, they’re not really great for generating ideas. We start editing our ideas and making them perfect before we really even have them. That’s a lot of wasted time and effort. Trust us, we have learned this lesson the hard way.
After we have between 5-10 sketches that we like, we can finally bring our ideas to the computer. We use a 21.5” iMac and Adobe Illustrator to create our logos because it creates a vector file. In short, vector files are scalable files. For example, if I tried to blow up a cell phone picture and put it on a billboard, it’ll likely be blurry because it’s a raster file. Vector files can scale up (or down) without losing any pixelation. That’s why we choose to use Illustrator over Photoshop when creating any sort of file.
Because we already knew the color palette we were going to use, that part was already done. When people interact with our brand, we want them to feel comfortable, warm, and cozy so we decided to use warm color tones- so reds and oranges. Since we both very much love nature and plants, we wanted to use earthy tones as well, so the colors we chose have some percentage of brown in them.
We’ll be honest, we don’t think we’ll ever be able to make a custom typeface. The entire process seems way too intimidating to start now, so we went the safe route and chose an already made one. We make sure to obtain any licenses if needed to use the font and then we’re good to go!
We combine our typefaces and our color palette to create a basic draft of the logo. We’ll typically have around 20 designs to pick from when we’re done arranging and coloring the text. We like to make several different versions of our logo when we’re finished to use in different instances so we keep that in mind when creating our drafts.
When we finally narrow it down to only a couple, we begin working on our motif. Our motif will be used as an icon as well as a repeating pattern throughout our social media accounts and our website. This is what people will likely remember as it is an image of sorts and humans are definitely visual. That’s good though - you’ll want to have brand consistency.
After our motif is done, we’ll add it to the drafts of our logos to help us narrow down our final decision. It’s never an easy decision, but to help us choose we spend days looking at the options, and then we’ll take a few days to take a break from it. When we come back with “fresh eyes,” we’ll be able to pick out any flaws and make the big decision.
Anyway, here’s what we came up with. We really like plants (don’t act so surprised, geez) so we decided to keep it simple with a cool leaf design as our icon. We don’t sell plants (yet) but we do sell a ton of plant-related items because they’ve basically taken over our whole life. The font is cool and the colors make us personally feel really nice, so we hope they evoke the same feelings for you.
We really like the new logo design better for a multitude of reasons but mostly because it truly feels more like us. Of course, we solved the issues we were having at the beginning with our old logo, too, so that’s even better. The colors are very similar between both logos, but we decided to add some more natural pink/tan tones as well. It’s perfect for us and we hope you enjoy it just as much as we do!
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing these logo updates to our website and our social media accounts. We’re going to have to order new business cards and other literature so the branding may be slightly confusing for a while as we use up what we have until we receive our new ones. Thank you for your patience through this confusing time!
What do you think about our rebrand? Do you think it works better? We are currently obsessed.
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