In this article I will talk about how I came to the name for my freelancing business ‘Just Creative Design’ and also the logo design process that I used to design the award winning logo that you see above.
The process I used was somewhat disjointed and a very long one at that… mainly because I was designing for myself and I had no idea what ‘brand’ I was after but this is it. Enjoy.
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What will be my business name?
Believe it or not but this was one of the hardest parts of the process. Before I had JCD I was freelancing under the name of ‘JackCass Productions’ - this was when I was 15. This was a clever pun of my name Jacob and Cass. I get called ‘Jack’ and ‘Jake’ quite a bit for my nickname instead of Jacob and when you combine the nickname Jack and my last name Cass… well you get JackCass or jackass if you will.
I actually got about very mixed feelings about this name JackCass Productions. About 70% of people loved it, and were actually quite envious of the name and then about 30% of people would say why would you want to be called that in a professional business? There were pros and cons for both however in the end I chose not to continue using this name for the long term and I think I made the right choice… But in saying that I still have the domain jackcass.com which I use for a personal side blog - that never gets updated.
Ok, so now I had the problem of choosing whether to brand myself as my name ‘Jacob Cass’ or another name. Obviously I went with the latter however I still bought my domain name jacobcass.com. But now what to choose for my business name? I decided I wanted something unique, I wanted the word design in the title but I also wanted it to include my initials in the name - ego I know.
I had a million ideas, as you do… Jucy, Jaycii, JayZee, JayCee, Jaci, Jaysee, JayCee, JaySee, JaiSee, Juju, Juca, Joco, Jluc, Jaco, JC, JLBC and I won’t bore you with the hundred more that I had.
Sketches
I couldn’t come down to a name I liked so I just played around with my initials to make a logo and you can see the sketches below of trying to get J and C to work together. There were six A3 pages so I had to take a photo of it… it is 2mb if you want to look at it full size. And I am no Picasso so shhh.
From these sketches I had the idea of trying to make the initials JCD into a pencil and after a bit of experimenting I got it to work. Need to know how to be creative?
Throughout the whole process I was up in air about the name of the business so I played with the names JackCass, Jacob Cass and Just Creative Design.
Illustrator
After getting the initial idea I had some fun playing around in Illustrator with different typefaces, sizes, porportions etc which you can see in the picture to see what typefaces worked, what line widths and combinations worked best together and just some other design ideas.
More play with the pencil idea…
The Final Two Concepts
I then finally came down to two styles, one which was the led pencil style and one which is below.
At this time I received feedback from peers and from forums and many people told me that there was so many logos that incorporated the Fibonnaci Squirl. After a little research I found this was true and this meant that my logo would not be unique. So I went with the led pencil idea that I thought was working quite well so I continued with that. It was here that I tried to get the best size for the pencil to show off the JCD initials as well as making sure it looked like a pencil.
Font Change
I ended up choosing the third size down from the top however something was not quite sitting with me and I narrowed it down to the font. I changed it to the font I used in the other example which was the free font Delicious and that solved all my problems - I was happy with the JCD initial, pencil and the font. It was a great black and white logo.
Colour
This was where I played a lot with colour however I narrowed it down to the blue or the pink that I originally had in mind and then I chose out of these four colour combinations. I felt pink had more energy and was not so corporate and this was the decision I made. Pink black and white were my colours and my brand.
Award Winning Final Logo
Above you can see the finished logo and I couldn’t be happier with the feedback I have received from everyone on this logo. At least once a week I get someone complimenting it which gives me a warm giddy feeling inside. Oh and the fact that it incorporates my initials into it 
In fact I entered this logo into the Logo Design Love Awards and it won the readers appreciation award (as voted by you so thank you!) and then on top of that we came 15th out of 100+ blogs in the overall Blog Logo Design Competition.
Adrian Hanft , co-founder of Be A Design Group had this to say about my logo when it won the award.
So often logos fall into cliché. This is usually a danger to avoid, but if you can put a new spin on an overused idea then you actually benefit from people’s awareness of the idea. You can turn a negative reaction into a positive one, and that has impact. The idea of using a pencil and sketching to represent creativity could be cliché, but this logo overcomes it. The JCD are just imperceptible enough to let the viewer feel rewarded for finding them. Same with the pencil. The typography is understated and it matches the humble positioning of “just creative.” They aren’t trying to be too clever, too flashy, or too self-important. They’re just creative.
Final Logo with Evil Comics Sans MS
And just for kicks, what if my logo used Comic Sans? Evil, Evil, Evil.
Well there we have it boys and girls, the logo design process I used to create the logo in my blog header. I hope you enjoyed it. Comments are always appreciated.
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