Yesterday designers in Cape Town and Joburg got together to design a logo in one day. 67 designers. 67 logos. The Cape Town designers worked from a beautiful space in Woodstock called Workshop 17. The idea dreamt up and hosted by CWDi – a marketing and events agency, is to help small businesses and entrepreneurs by gifting them a free logo. South Africa needs start-ups, we need job creation, we need small companies who can do big things and make real changes in peoples lives. These companies need professional looking logos. That’s where we came in. Each designer had to report for duty at 8:30, set up and be ready to be briefed by 9. My client was Anna a lovely woman from Stellenbosch who educate and support local crafters and sell their curious under the name iThemba which means hope. Anna was great, she was really clear about what she wanted and came ready with an idea for her logo. All I had to do was make it pretty, which I happen to be pretty good at. (I’ve had a lot of practice) Still, our first review was at 12, so I had 3 cups of coffee, put my headphones on, pressed play and hoped that I’ll have something to show in 2 and a half hours time!
By 12 I had worked out the little hands and heart icon and had some font options for her to look at. Anna told me that iThemba is known for their lino cutting so we decided that her business cards, price tags and gift bags will be lino printed on natural papers, which will give it that lovely handmade texture and would be a perfect fit for the business. We both got really excited about the idea of also printing the hands and heart icon on all kinds of products like tea towels and coasters. For web purposes, I added in a texture. After chatting about her business some more we settled on a font and I got down to finessing the logo. Lunch was a quick salad and a lot of cake at my desk (I like to follow a balanced diet) The logos had to be done by 14:30, I wanted to give Anna as many variations of her logo as possible so that she can leave with bank of options to use depending on her business needs. iThemba is both a shop and a training and support centre for crafters so, in reality, she needed two logos for the two different parts of her business. I had another hour and a half.
At 14:30 I uploaded my logo to the presentation. Saved out my files and send We-transferred it over to Anna. Then everyone gathered in the meeting room to look at all the logos that were created. I was honestly blown away by the amount of talent, creativity and speediness. There were some amazing logos, apparently, designers work well under pressure, although we should probably keep that info under wraps. It was weirdly a fun day, you wouldn’t think that working fast under a crazy deadline would be so much fun, but it really was. It’s good to get out of your head, make some quick decisions and do good in the world. I’ll definitely sign up again next year.