I’ve very recently been working on an illustrative logo design for a new business branded as ‘The Queen of Easy Green’. I’ll take you through the design brief, the mood board and the finalised designs.

brand identity brief
The Queen of Easy Green (also under the personal brand of Lyndsey Young) will focus on idea creation; helping customers to get more for their money, including through the practice of waste reduction in the home.

On offer will be a range of funky and ‘easy to eco’ products to help families save time, money and create less waste in their kitchen. As such Lyndsey wanted to launch this under a mascot/personal brand theme and had firm ideas about how the character should look.

I was offered colours and images as part of a ‘mood board’ to help focus me on how the Queen of Easy Green should appear. It was one of the rare times that a client has presented me with an image based mood board. I create them myself very frequently, but it’s rare for a client to present images like this. I must say, it was exceptionally useful compared to just words alone.

Below you can view the mood board, not all the images I was provided are on there, just a few of those that I felt were the most important for me to think about when creating the character. As you can see, a colour scheme was also firmly in mind.

The character needed to be quirky, fun and with a bit of a 50s retro ‘housewife’ feel.

the design

This below is the completed design, also some rationale for my choice of colours and apparel:

1. Hair is green because I like the way it generalises the colouration of the character more and reduces the suggestion of any sort of cultural heritage, plus also like the way it characterises her as the Queen of Easy ‘GREEN’ even further by being green in some way in her actual physical colouration.

2. I’ve toned down the original colour suggestions a tad because very bright colours appeal to low income groups and The Queen of Easy Green is targeting more of the ‘Cath Kidston’ type of person target market. Yellow was not introduced because three vibrant colours (as opposed to two) added too much clutter to fairly detailed design.

3. The lady is in this specific attire for a several reasons;
a. Stiff shirts on ladies were popular in the 50′s
b. Stiff shirt implies practical/efficient/professional, which we want to convey.
c. The apron gives us that 50′s feel still, plus also hints at ‘kitchen’ in a fun colourful way.

4. She is half height so we can have her closer up and see the expression and detail. If she has legs/body, she’ll have to be further away and smaller compared to the text and with this would present practicality issues with a moderately detailed design such as this.

5. The arm fold helps to cut her off at the waist without showing any amputated’ areas like an cut off waist, yet they are not folded in an aggressive or unfriendly manner.

marketing collateral
We haven’t started on stationery design yet, but I’m thinking something along these lines for the business cards will be a good way forward.