I’m about to write about one of my favourites projects of ALL time. Ever. This project had everything a designer looks for in a project: The idea was totally fresh, the clients were amazing, and the whole process was delightful from start to finish. Here’s how it all began:
In what seems like years ago, Meg Makins, a friend from university, send me a brief and exciting email. It went something like this: “I’m going to start a mobile snow cone business with my friend. Wanna do the branding!?”. I said “Yes!” (and added a few squeals and exclamation points) and a few months later, I sat down with Meg and Lindsay at Mulberry Coffee in Hamilton to talk about their vision.
I came away from that meeting totally inspired. This wasn’t your average snow-cone business. For one, Meg and Lindsay (while adorable) aren’t just cute for the sake of being cute. Behind their sparkly dispositions, these guys are serious: Serious about quality, about sourcing all their ingredients locally, about making all their syrups from scratch, about representing their city in all its glory.
As visions of snow cones danced in my head, I set to work. My first attempts were still a touch too cute and a little too twee: I chose fonts that were curly and quaint, and it didn’t really match the picture Meg and Lindsay had painted. I eventually landed on a font combination that hit the right balance between sweet and serious, and finalized the palette. Another serious break-through in the design process was to apply a faux-screen printing look to the logo. I used a craft paper texture for this effect. This completely gelled with their “do it by hand” mantra, and as a bonus, it looked hella cool. Here’s a breakdown:
And here’s how those elements came together in the final logo:
While I was working on the logo, Meg and Lindsay commissioned their friend and illustrator Andrea Manica to create some original artwork to incorporate into the brand. Andrea is AMAZING and she sketched out portraits, ingredients, and host of other beautiful doodles (you have permission to leave this post for a minute and check out some of her work). Andrea provided oodles of sketches to me, and from there I colourized them, made them vectors, and them and worked them into the Sweet Ice story.
With all these elements in place, designing collateral for Sweet Ice has been a joy. Below is just a taste of some of the work done for them so far: business cards, posters, desktop wallpapers, and fundraiser postcards:
I really hope this post have given you a taste (pardon the pun) for what the Sweet Ice girls are all about. If want to find out even more, watch the happiest video of all time, which is also called their commercial. I didn’t make this, but I did watch it 20 times, so that sort of counts, right? 🙂
Thanks again to Meaghan and Lindsay for allowing me to play a small part in bringing these sweet treats to the peeps of Hamilton!
