A Creative Year

Author Anthony Muchina contacted me regarding several creative projects he needed for the launch of his new business, appropriately called ‘Muchina’. The company will be selling various luxury items, and the client was looking for something stylish, that would work no matter what type of product he was selling. Initially, the leaning was toward a script style lettermark, and I kept that in mind as I sketched. However, after brainstorming and sketching, we ended up going a different direction. Here is a scan of a few of the sketches:

I typically come up with as many ideas as I can and try not to limit myself in any way through the sketching process. Then, after I’ve exhausted that and have a few ideas that stand out, I like to quickly mock-up a couple of them. At this point I send everything to the client, with an explanation of various stand-out ideas and the thought process, if it needs explanation. I’m not shy about showing them both the good and the bad – you never know what will spark some inspiration. There’s some debate about this, as some designers fear the client will pick out something that really should not be used, but when that happens I find that you can explain why it would not be a good choice, and also find out what attracts the client to that particular design and try to take that aspect of it and carry it into a something that will make more sense.

For the Muchina logo, right away the client saw one he liked and we went to work perfecting it. There were many experimental changes using slightly different shapes and fonts. We went back and forth a few times, and all told there were 26 variations of the chosen logo sent to the client. The final logo was shown at the beginning of this post, in black and white. You can see some of the spacing relationships here:

The type face used was Gill Sans. The shifting of the ‘Muchina’ name to the left helps to offset the weight in the symbol above – even though it is technically not truly centered, moving it left looks right to the eye. The amount of spacing between each letter (tracking) equals the amount of space from the right edge of the circle to the right edge of the sliver, and the space from the symbol to the type is 75% of that space.

Next we will be designing the packaging for the initial product, with the client indicating the box will be purple with 1 color printing (an undetermined golden hue). After that, I will be working on the website design. We’ll highlight those projects in a future post and also include a testimony from the client.