My husband runs a recording studio out of our basement (he also does graphic design for his day gig). One of his long-time clients is a very talented viola player named, Scott Slapin. Both he and his wife, Tanya Solomon, have built their careers around a common love: the viola.
So when Scott and Tanya wanted a logo design for their mutual website, “Slapin-Solomon Viola Duo,” and my husband was too busy in the studio to help, he asked if I would take over the design of the logo.
My idea was to put something together that showed the duality of their duo: they’re married and they’re both professional, well-known viola players. Anything I came up with had to place an emphasis on that duality.
My first concept, and by far my favorite, was to have two violas that overlapped and came together as one. I decided to have the strings twist until they reached the neck.
I was really happy with how it came out, despite struggling with the drawing of the strings. I wanted them to appear like they were loosely painted brushstrokes. Think: .
I also came up with smaller versions of the design where the text was placed vertically, making the composition more compact and perfect for business cards. My favorite is this grey one!
Despite me liking this design, I felt compelled to come up with a back-up idea incase they didn’t like the first one. Their website has a peach and red color to it so I figured showcasing something in color might also be nice and would look good on the site (see logo to the right).
Luckily, I didn’t have to worry which one they liked because they were happy with both.
I also created a favicon (that’s the tiny little image that sometimes is shown next to a website link in the URL window of your browser) for the site that matched the twisted strings logo in shape but used the colors from the rounded logo.
It was a real pain to come up with an idea for this because despite the size shown below, the real favicon is only 16×16 pixels in size and it’s hard to get something to fit in a box that small and still be readable/understandable as to what it’s supposed to be. I tried 5 times before I wound up with something that would work. And once I did, I made 3 varieties of it. The one below is what they went with.
I’m really pleased with how everything came out. Scott and Tanya are easy clients to work with. I appreciated that they let me take the ball and run with my ideas blindly. I work best when I’m given the space to think about what I want to create.
If you’ve had a life-long love with music and are interested in learning the viola, they are currently teaching online viola video lessons via Skype. How cool is that?
