So, I've been working on a new logo and website with my design partner, the talented Austin Payne at Trek Your Market. For most folks, the new growth of your company happens while you are still juggling day-to-day business. That is to say, it's almost impossible to turn your full attention to creating an emblem of yourself, while you manage the demands of your business and daily life. I understand this first hand.
Alas, the creative process has a lifeline of its own, if you allow it to unfold organically. Some say there are six phases in this journey, consisting of inspiration, clarification, distillation, perspiration, evaluation and incubation.
I've learned that it is vital to dance with the process, to play with your choices in order for the most authentic representation of you to come forth. The symbols in my new logo are meaningful to me, representing my personal style.
For example, the anchor represents the old ship anchor sitting in my front yard, at the foot of the Atlantic Intercoastal Waterway. It anchors me to Charleston. From my desk window I face this gorgeous date palm tree that teases me into a daydream when it sways gently in the breeze. And the arrows! I draw lots of arrows! I draw them daily in my mind-mapping process with pen and ink.
Now, onto the Indigo connection. For the color of my logo, we initially began with a turquoise blue, the color of my water bliss. Somehow I could not decide on the exact color, so we played with it, back and forth, first light, then deeper and deeper until it became green! It just didn't speak to me. I liked it, but it wasn't "the one."
In the meantime, I fished out a torn page from a Charleston magazine that was pinned to one of my vision boards. It was about The Vat Shack set up by Enough Pie for folks to try their hands at Indigo dyeing. The next session was this past Saturday. I went, I explored the process, made new community connections, notably with Director of Enough Pie, Cathryn Zommer and a super talented indigo dye artist, Leigh Magar. To boot, I came home with a gorgeous piece of wearable art!
That was the missing link, of course - Indigo! My favorite color has always been dark blue, denim, ultramarine, cobalt, lapis lazuli, azure, what have you. Blue is one of the rarest colors found in nature. In the book, “Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World,” by Catherine McKinley, she says that “For almost five millennia, in every culture and every major religion, indigo has been one of the world’s most valued pigments. No color has been prized so highly or for so long, or been at the center of such turbulent human encounters.”
Indigo seeds were planted in the Lowcountry hundreds of years ago and became a highly desired crop that was exported to England. What I find so fascinating about it is that when the blue indigo powder goes into a vat, it turns green. When we add a natural cotton fabric the indigo liquid turns that fabric green as well. The magic begins once we take the fabric out of the dye and into the air! Oxygen turns it indigo blue again!
The alchemical magic of indigo is a metaphor for the creative odyssey. Alchemy is defined as “A seemingly magical process of transformation, a creation, or combination.”
The lesson is to embrace the process, however messy and inconvenient. One must go further than meets the eye in order to achieve a resoundingly authentic outcome. It may take more time, it may not be a straight path, but most assuredly if the journey is taken on with an open heart, in the end result will be in sync with your authentic self!
Voila! My new logo color for The KL Creative is indigo. Of course!
To learn more about Trek Your Market visit www.trekyourmarket.com