Evolution of a Brand: Cari Hollis

Cari has been a dear friend of mine for more than a decade and, funny enough, we were friends long before we ever met in person. We “met” on an online, wedding-planning forum. We got married within a few months of each other and formed a friendship with a large group of women. She started her photography business shortly after her wedding and she asked me to design a logo and branding for her. We finally got to meet when I hired her to shoot some family photos when my oldest was about nine months old.

The flower motif and colors were inspired by the custom camera strap she found on Etsy. We designed a bunch of logo variations, business cards, website buttons, and more. We even did gift certificates and advertising graphics for social media.

A few years later, Cari was ready to rebrand and she had NO idea what she wanted for her new logo. She had also added the role of a birth doula and birth photographer to her repertoire. We tried a lot of different concepts, color schemes, fonts, and graphics and, after a lot of back and forth, we finalized this design. This is still one of my favorite logos that I created for her.

After many years as an amazing photographer, she decided to hang up her camera and delve into a couple of different direct sales companies and social media consulting, and since they usually require you to use their pre-designed graphics, we went a different direction and branded Cari all on her own.

This way, her brand remained the same no matter what kind of business she was working on. The bokeh backgrounds paid homage to her background as a photographer.

Earlier this year we rebranded again. Cari wanted to keep the gardenia as a graphic element and we kept the typewriter font because it’s a favorite of hers. We went with the same color scheme for the most and will keep the bokeh backgrounds, but added new fonts and a watercolor motif too.

She hasn’t been able to update her website with her newer branding yet because she’s busy running Direct Creatives!

You can watch the TikTok video I made documenting how I created her new logo here.

I love how Cari maintains the same general color palette with the purple and aqua.

I’m curious where her branding will head next!

Samy and Leo Painting

My friend and taekwondo master Samery asked me if I’d recreate this photo of her with her husky, Leo in watercolor and I was more than thrilled to do it for her. Corona Arch is one of my favorite hikes in the Moab, UT area as is apparent with how many times I’ve painted it.

This photo proved to be an interesting challenge with the position of the sun and shadows. Samy and Leo are sitting in the shadow of the arch with the sun behind the arch itself, but the shadows have been brightened up considerably. I chose to scoot them forward a little so I could give them a nice cast shadow. This grounded them to the rock better than when I tried to put them in the shade on an early sketch.

Of course, then I was left with what to do with the arch itself with the sun right behind it. The arch should be much darker than it really is and the sun causing a flare on either side. Rather than figure out how to do this in watercolor, I just gave everything a rim light; the arch, Samy, and Leo.

There’s just something cool about a rim light and a cast shadow.

What do you think?

I still go back and forth on whether these were wise decisions and I have debated brightening up the sky in that space where the sun is supposed to be, but the end result is still something I’m happy with. I’ll cut a custom mat for it before giving it to Samy.

Below you can view a TikTok video of the process in time lapse. I did continue to make a few changes after I stopped filming, but it’s pretty close.

Coyote Hills Elementary Logo

A while back my friend, Brandi reached out to me about creating a new logo for the elementary school where she’s a teacher. It just so happens to be the same elementary school where both she and I were students back in the 1980s. The school district made some big changes last year, and one of them included a new name for our old school and I was asked to help them with a new logo.

It has been such fun to be part of the process to rebrand MY elementary school.

They had students submit hand-drawn concepts for the logo and the school committee (made up of teachers and the principal) chose one as a conceptual starting-off point for me. That drawing involved a howling coyote with beams of light in a circle around it. The landscape I created in the background is a portion of Coyote Hills Regional Park that the school is named after. I grew up hiking in those hills and going there on field trips!

It was a fun process taking that student’s artwork and turning it into a professional logo and I’m really happy with the final concept. I sent them multiple versions of this logo in one color, two colors, and three colors. That way they have multiple options in the event they want to print on t-shirts or make stickers.

Thanks so much for this fun opportunity!!

Follow me on TikTok!

As a middle-aged lady, AKA: member of the Oregon Trail Generation, I avoided TikTok as much as I avoided Twitter… which was a lot. But this spring a friend convinced me that TikTok could be a potentially awesome funnel for my business, so I begrudgingly downloaded it. I’m still learning how to upload videos at different lengths and how to find music that fits, all while trying to figure out how to create interesting content. But I’m starting to feel more and more comfortable with it.

My new Canvas Lamp has TOTALLY helped with this. You can read about it here.

One thing I do know, TikTok is a HUGE time suck. I will flip through a few videos and suddenly two hours have passed. I’ll go all day without looking at TikTok and see 50+ notifications that my sister or my husband has shared videos with me. #enablers

I plan to keep the content art-related as much as possible. I did post a video last week of me making peach jam, so there will be randoms non-art here and there. Although some may argue that making jam IS an art.

I have gone back and forth many times on whether to share about my taekwondo training and black belt journey. But since my black belt test is in two weeks, I feel like if I was going to document that journey, I should have started six months ago. Oh well. If I ever decide to get a 2nd Dan in taekwondo, maybe I will document THAT journey. Practicing martial arts is a whole other world when you don’t start as a kid.

Any requests on art content?? Any techniques you’d like to see?? I do a lot of landscape watercolor and wet-on-wet painting. I am considering diving back into oil painting, so maybe I’ll take some videos there too.

LÍLLÉbaby Product Manuals

For about four and a half years, I had the pleasure of working for LÍLLÉbaby as a contract graphic designer. They’re a baby carrier company that sells a variety of babywearing products like infant carriers, toddler carriers, stretchy wraps, ring slings, and more.

Their original user manuals used photographs of an adult and a baby to show step-by-step instructions on how to use the baby carriers. Some of the photos weren’t very clear on how each step was performed and in some instances, it was tough to get the baby to cooperate (which is totally understandable!). Plus, if any of the photos needed to be retaken, it was very difficult to find another baby the same size/age to recreate an image and maintain continuity.

They came to me with the idea of having a simplified drawing for each step rather than a photograph AND a goal to make the drawings as clear as possible so there could be as little text as possible. When these products are shipped to different countries, they have to have the manuals translated into different languages. Some phrases get confused in translations, so if the drawings were very clear, then there would hopefully be less confusion.

We started with the stretchy wrap and ring sling carriers. These first manuals were fun to create as a single page that folded up to be a little bigger than a business card.

From there we slowly started rebranding all of the booklet manuals for their existing Complete and CarryOn carriers.

As the years went on and they launched new products, I was thrilled to get to create new manuals for them; from carriers and wraps to accessories like a rain cover and a snuggly winter cover. For most products, we eventually created an international version that included all of the translated languages in one, big manual.

LÍLLÉbaby carriers were already my favorites when my boys were babies, so my knowledge on how their products work was integral in drawing these as clear and concise as possible. Understanding safe and correct babywearing made it easy for me to create these drawings and be in compliance with safety regulations and reduce any liability on the company.

Each new product was a new and fun challenge and they were truly a pleasure to create.