Today has been a very exciting day. A couple of weeks ago I met with a graphic designer called Sophie and explained our vision for Well Vale to her. We also took along my mother’s Wye College emblem, a wheatsheaf, as we visualised something similar as forming the central element of our logo. Sophie had produced a few ideas of routes that we might want to explore from my initial emails. We were looking for something distinctive that channelled our ethos into a design that would work on everything from packaging to literature and online media. Sophie showed us some woodcut style designs that had a heritage feel but were also quite contemporary and simple enough to work on packaging. Sophie felt we need a tag line too, as ‘Well Vale’ didn’t portray what the company did. We came up with ‘Naturally Well Produced Food’ after a bit of collaboration in the office. I wanted something with ‘natural’ in and Brenda suggested bringing ‘Well’ in, as in ‘Well hung meat’, which gave us all a giggle, but I wasn’t sure it had quite the gravitas I was looking for!
Sophie’s initial design came through and we had a look at it. My first reaction was of disappointment as the central motif was not a wheatsheaf, but a more abstract repeated leaf/kernel of corn. Once I looked past this I could see lots of positive and Sophie had shown a label mock up, which looked really good. The logo also worked both with and without the tag line. The shape was good – it had the feel of a stamp, which gave it a ‘stamped with approval’ quality, an idea of Sophie’s that we had liked at our meeting. I also liked the font she had chosen and the colours. I asked her to re-look at the wheatsheaf because although I could see her design worked I wanted something where the agricultural link was explicit rather the subliminal. About 2 hours later Sophie had sent through two more ideas, featuring central motifs that were clearly wheatsheaves, but still with a contemporary aesthetic. On first sight I preferred the simpler design with 5 ears as I felt it was cleaner, but Gay and Brenda went for the slightly more ‘full’ wheatsheaf. Brenda also pointed out that from some angles the motif with 5 ears looked like a welding glove, and once I’d got that in my head I couldn’t stop seeing it that way. I printed out a copy for everyone and we have bought them home to get some other people’s opinions. I can’t stop looking at it, and it feels great to finally have a visual on the page of something that has been in my head for so long. In a way it is the first physical ‘thing’ the business has. We might end up making one or two little tweaks, but I can see the brand emerging and Sophie’s work has exactly the feel I want. I love working with talented people, and Sophie has instantly got my vision. A good day!