Not even 5 years ago, branding for a photographer was seemingly superfluous and almost narcissistic. Not anymore. If you want to get noticed in the photo world, branding is a key and crucial element. This logo and identity revamp of the seasoned location and lifestyle photographer Scott Montgomery, was to incorporate his love of music, food and classic, warm home decor. So, a woodblock-influenced typographic logo design solution in a rather unorthodox vertical format seemed to fit the bill.
The primary reason for the vertical format was to get the logo to fit into his new website design. The previous logo was starting to look out of place and wasn’t really conveying the style Scott wanted to project in his new venture in rebranding his business. So, rather than dropkick the website design, I thought I would try and design something to work within those parameters. Unfortunately, ‘Montgomery’ is not that easy to fit into most design solutions without getting a bit wide. From the challenge came the inspiration. All those rock and jazz posters from Hatch Show Print and the like all had some pretty unique and adventurous typography in the designs. Scott has a passion for music and that sort of style – it seemed like a worthy gamble to explore.
After presenting some of the work, it was a pretty clear decision on which direction he wanted to pursue and we were off and running. Even though the very vertical logo design was the first to be implemented, I was pretty confident that the modular elements of the type could be arranged to work in a more square and horizontal direction as well. Fingers crossed, right.
From there, we moved on to a WordPress blog, an email template and a printed, 4-color mailer.
For the mailer, to accommodate the full-color images that he wanted to showcase, we had to design a mailer template that could work for an extended period and several mailings to bring some consistency to his new branding. Although, he does like paper with a nice tooth, we didn’t want to overwhelm ourselves with a great deal of hand work (tipping coated paper images on to textured stock) to build the mailings, because of time and budget constraints. We’d already been there with previous promotional pieces. Including the chip board in the imagery seemed like a nice alternative.
Overall, the work has a clean look with a bold, new logo design to grace it. And yes, it works in a square and horizontal version, too.
Feel free to check out Scott Montgomery’s website and his brand, spankin’ new blog.