TEN YEARS!!

It's been ten years! Can you believe it? I thought I would post a quick post about the journey. As I was digging through the archive of photos, designs, bits of this or that, I thought I would share some insights into our branding journey.

It took me a minute to come up with the name, nothing exciting about it. The dot-com and social media handles were available. The main logic behind the name was that I wanted it to easily represent what it was and be searchable. Logos are always my favorite part. Here's the rough early ideas; I kinda like the lower right one. Maybe someday I'll use it for something. In the end, none of these felt like they represented "sketching."

Here's the rough sketch of the logo I ended up using. It's loose and feels sketched, so I went with it.

Did you know the original character was going to be a wallet with a face and legs? He just wasn't cool enough and also was limiting. If I got into more products than just wallets, then a wallet character would be a bad idea. The name Sketch Wallet is also limiting if I wanted to expand to other products, so I bought inkys.com as well. In a future post, I'll tell the story of almost losing the domain inkys.com, it's a nail-biter.

You can see the Inky character came from a crappy tiny doodle in one of my sketchbooks that I scanned in and polished up in Adobe Illustrator.

And then the final logo. I wanted it to look familiar and nostalgic. A company's logo should be cool enough that someone would wear it on a t-shirt, even if they don't use your products. Even though I love the final logo, it does have some challenges. It doesn't fit well in a circle, so social media profile pictures are awkward. It also doesn't work well as a lapel pin, or a patch, or a sticker, because it has a floating drip. You'd have to have two pieces or contain it in a shape, but it does work well as a leather stamp, t-shirt, or woven label.

There's the quick version... stay tuned for more insights into the last 10 years!

Keep creating!