A new project I really enjoyed was for a company very endearingly named ‘We Love Holibobs’.

When ‘Holibobs’ first approached us I was already enamored by the company name before creativity even began. Just the name ‘We Love Holibobs’ was enough to start a creative flurry in my mind.

That’s before I even knew what a Holibob was!

So What Is A Holibob?
Well apparently I’m old and un-hip enough (thank goodness this job educates me in all things hip!) to not know already that Holibob means ‘Holiday’.

Thus ‘We Love Holibobs’ will offer the discerning and trendy customer holiday fashions and essentials.

Design Brief
We Love Holibobs were looking for a design that had an air of ‘retro’ to it and to be fun and funky without being excessively girlish in style. I was also told that they are very much a fan of ‘folk art‘ styling.

It was indicated that they had a leaning towards replacing the word ‘Love’ with an actual heart as in the famous “We Love New York” motif. Great minds think alike, I’d already thought that the second I heard the name.

Because of the holiday nature of the company and the interest in having something a bit retro something what immediately came to mind was to have something featuring a birds and clouds (flight).

I suggested this to the client and she was interesting in seeing this concept come to life. I suggested that we could either use either:

A Bluebird: Mainly because I liked the idea of using blue and also because of my love of the 1940′s (retro) technicolour movie called The Bluebird.

A Swallow: It just seemed like a tattoo type bird to me and for some reason tattoo style was coming to mind for the design. After researching (see below) it became clear as to why I was associating Swallows with travel and tattoos.

Research
As with all projects I immediately started researching imagery and facts relating to my project and my ideas on birds, clouds, and the use of a retro heart within the design and like many of my projects unearthed some interesting facts about these concepts/object.

You can see the completed logo design below before I expand further on the research that led to this design.

First of all I looked at folk art styling and felt that I very much wanted the heart to have folk art feel … much of folk art is associated with needlework and patchwork/crafts.

I discovered with great interest that Folk Art crosses over with Pop Art – I’m a huge fan of pop art as you will know if you follow this blog/view the portfolio. It also made it clear as to one of the reasons why my portfolio was so appealing to the client.

Thus the line around the heart aims to give it a patchwork quilt/stitched feel to it. I also personally think that folk art hearts are very reminiscent of Shaker crafts.

Now, as far as the birds and clouds are concerned my first instinct was that the bird should be a swallow or bluebird for reasons explained above.

I wanted a design that echos the feel of a tattoo, and swallows are rife in tattoos, and actually bluebirds are very common also in tattoos….. I also figured that sailors wear tattoos and sailors are of a traveling nature

After conducting some research I discovered that in fact the reason why swallows are so popular in tattoo art is because it was historically common for sailors to symbolise their sailing experience with the use of a swallow tattoo….reason being that a swallow is very much a migratory bird.

Bluebirds are also associated with sailors and travel, but I decided that actually I liked the pointy shape of a swallow compared to the more rounded shape of a bluebird.

Add in a folk art/retro style heart, and a sense of ‘folk art stitching’ and movement in the swirl of the swallows flight and hey presto, we had a design concept for We Love Holibobs.

The font was selected for it’s curved retro styling, although it did need quite a few tweaks to some of the lettering to make it more readable within the design.

This first design concept was instantly accepted with just a few minor tweaks.

The Design In Use
I think you’ll agree that whilst the design works well against white, it also looks fetching against brown….