A few short months ago, I approached Charlie Gilkey of Productive Flourishing about creating a new logo — or wordmark — for his site. He had been tweeting a lack of satisfaction with the old design and it occurred to me that the process of revamping his “look” could be a wonderful topic for both our sites.

We exchanged a few lengthy emails and I got to work. I knew from our discussions that he wanted more color (the original site was all in grayscale) and further that he wanted colors that were both grounded and hopeful.

To me, this translated as a dark, earthy brown, combined with a rich amber and a bright spring green. (As sometimes happens, this was an uncannily accurate guess of what he had himself been considering.)

What’s needed is to make the appearance of the name somehow “go” with the meaning of the name.

Along with Charlie’s sense of what was needed, I of course brought my own instincts and judgments about what would make his wordmark strong and interesting. Most small, creative businesses on the web don’t need a logo, per se — that is, they don’t need a clever graphical symbol to represent the “brand.” The name of the site/company IS the brand. What’s needed is to make the appearance of the name somehow “go” with the meaning of the name. So I started with the name of Charlie’s business: Productive Flourishing.

Productive is such a solid, grounded word. And flourishing flows; it wants to take off. It’s more organic, and tender.

My initial type studies (in Fireworks, my web graphic tool of choice) played with the contrasts inherent in the two words. Bold/italic. CAPS/lowercase. Extrablack/thin. San-serif/serif.

I quickly settled on the notion that I wanted to use different variants of the same font family for each of the words, so that while each word would appear unique, they would be united by the font’s gestalt. And, because lowercase serif Fs look to me a little like growing shoots, I felt the F in flourishing, where the two words meet, needed to be in serif in contrast to the rest of the wordmark.

I did a little more playing, adjusting the sharpness of the text, experimenting with subtle shadows and a slight gradient to the background. Two versions went out to Charlie for him to peruse, basically the same design, but with slightly different hues and backgrounds.

As sometimes happens, the project languished here for a bit. Charlie liked the design, and had a preference for the flat background, but was thinking about changing his tagline, or, as he eventually decided, eliminating it from the wordmark completely. He also had a suggestion: could the O in productive be made to look a bit like a clock? And what about making the dots for the i’s in flourishing into leaves?

You don’t often get such concrete suggestions and they usually aren’t this good. Still, I pondered a bit. The counter (the round center) of the O really wasn’t quite large enough to convey a clock metaphor clearly, and I didn’t want to change the overall proportions of the logo.

I decided to convert the text to vector paths and ungrouped the letters so I could edit the points just on the O. I opened the counter ever so slightly, making it more perfectly round. Then I filled the background of that center with a very slightly darker shade than the surrounding banner. Finally, I created the tiny hands for the “clockface” and set them to 9 — clearly recognizable as a time, and a “productive time” at that.

The leaves were trickier. I created one tiny leaf, experimenting with the size and direction of growth, then applied a very slight gradient and dropshadow to it, and cloned it for the second i-dot. I’ll confess that I’m still not completely satisfied with them, although I am very pleased with the overall effect:

You can see the wordmark in context at Charlie’s wonderful site.