Savonnerie logo

Hand-on-heart this was the most difficult and involved piece of work I have ever done and hence the one I love the best. The lovely people at Savonnerie London asked me to help with their rebranding a while back and while we're still working on that the logo is signed off. Logos are generally clean and simple so what on earth possessed me to go the other way?

Savonnerie London is a luxury soap company with a shabby-chic French rococo feel. Its products are hand-made from 100% natural ingredients and attention to detail is superb. I thought the logo should reflect this. This logo works because the area around the text is clean, so even when the logo is used very small, the text is still legible and the overall feel of the detail is still present. The details reflect the natural products - there are deer, ladybirds, bees, shells and a butterfly interspersed with ivy and oak leaves.

The style of the logo is that of an engraving, so the shadows are made of cross-hatched lines. The logo had to work from very small to very big, which meant creating it in Adobe Illustrator. I started off presenting the idea as a real rough, by copying and pasting bits of rococo art together to give the clients an idea of where I was headed. Looking back at this I can't quite believe they had such faith in me to let me carry on with my fanciful ideas, but I'm glad they did.

After this, I began the pencil sketching. This took maybe three or four goes of drawing and rubbing out bits; here is an early drawing:

Once the pencil sketch was approved I commence the inking - the old fashioned way, with a dip-pen and indian ink:

... and then finally I scanned this in, and traced it, every single cross-hatched line of it, in Illustrator. It was worth every late night sat at my desk - I get a warm glow every time I look at it. It's a wonderful thing when you get pretty much a free-rein from a client to create something really special. It's what the job's all about, I guess.