Design > Logos

The objective was to “restage” a department of American Greetings (AG). American Greetings Properties wanted a new image, a new website, a fun tagline – the whole shebang. They also wanted a new logo, with one caveat: we couldn’t change the logo. The AG logo had to stay locked up, rose and all, with a very-light-if-not-white background. The good thing about the map/island concept they chose, is that it gave me a lot of visual cues to work with – the most important being the masthead for the maps legend. We’d already had a simple design for the legend bar that would be on the website, so I worked up a bunch of solutions to top it off properly. Locking it up in a structure let me off the hook for having to always keep the background white (or close to it). The logos had to be really simple to match the illustration style I used, so it was sort of painful going through old map books for inspiration and seeing how beautifully designed they could be. I did all of this in 2013, so if it looks a little hipster-familiar today, rest assured it didn’t in 2013. :-)

OPTIONS: So many options! I really rubbed my brain all over how to deal with getting the AGP logo to work as is in the map legend concept. These are just a small sample of what I tried (the row along the bottom) along with what they approved in the end (up top in the final image). I’m pretty happy with the final I think. Less all about being piratey. and a more restrained.