Updated 30 March 2020 with small change to logo.

I’m designing a new logo for my photography. I’d had a logo I’d used for a few years, since establishing myself as a photographer and setting up my website. In fact I think it was a requirement to design one when I did my photography diploma. I’ve recently been doing a makeover of my website after studying the merits of having a site that is visually pleasing using compatible colours. It makes sense, if I want to produce photos that are visually pleasing I should have a site to display them that is itself visually pleasing.

I want to produce photos that represent the colours of the West Coast – the mountains, lakes, rivers and coastal areas. Much of the natural scenery has rich colours in the forests, the waters, the snow and the sky. I got the idea of taking a scene that combined some of those elements and picking out colours from that to make a palette of colours that were in harmony with each other. I would then use those colours as the primary colours for my web pages and ultimately my email and stationery. I duly picked out my colours and created my palette that I call my Mahinapua palette as it is based on a photo I took of the beautiful Lake Mahinapua a short distance south of Hokitika.

The evolution of the logo happened more or less accidentally. I was aware that my logo didn’t match those colours but hadn’t any plans to change it in the short term. I was working on another idea – I had the idea the putting streaks of the palette colours as a background to the page titles but like a lot of my ideas it didn’t look as good as I’d hoped so I abandoned it. However, it occurred to me that it might look good as a component of a logo. I worked on that idea and came up with a logo I’m rather pleased with.

The idea in the logo is that it represents streaks of colour from an artist’s brush, using the main colours from my Mahinapua palette. I finished it off with the slogan ‘Capturing the Colours of ‘the Coast’. I was going to use ‘West Coast’ but that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so well and ‘The Coast’ is a popular reference to the West Coast anyway.

Update 30 March 2020: As I got into using the logo the slogan ‘Capturing the Colours of the Coast ‘ seemed too cumbersome and didn’t fit easily into the design. I have now shortened it to ‘Colours of the Coast’ and I’m very happy with that as it still says what I want it to say and it fits much better into the design of the logo. 

So here, partly by design and partly by accident, along with a bit of evolution, is my new logo – along with the colour palette and the image it was derived from.