Palmer Market

Introduction

IBG was contacted and hired back in the Fall of 2018 to do an overhaul of a logo for a newly started business, Palmer Market. The business model at the time was to take antiques you find at estate or garage sales and give them new life for a modern day consumer. Think "Fixer Upper" target audience. The new logo needed to have a vintage look and feel to cater to that audience while bringing them a timeless mark as the business continues to rapidly grow.

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Ask a lot of stupid questions

When we're starting out doing a logo redesign, or any design for that matter, we have to learn all we can about the client and their business in a short period of time. You'd be wrong to assume we know anything about your business when we start. But the good news is, we love to learn new things.

We have some standard documentation we typically send over to get the ball rolling after a kickoff call to help us learn quickly, but in a pinch we'll just ask questions.

There's 4 key elements we always ask before we ever get started.

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• What do you do? - The question is pretty self explanatory, but this will let you know if your client has practiced their elevator pitch.

• Why does your business matter? - This can be a challenging for clients. It's not as simple as what you do better than a competitor, although sometimes that can be hard for a client to put into words too. It really comes down to what kind of impact are you leaving on society, or your sphere?

• What's your long term goals? - Occasionally, a client jumps into business just looking to make money as quick as possible. What happens after that?

• What brands do you admire? - This can help you understand how much vision your client has for their company or brand.

Ultimately, all of this helps us understand the client better and also helps take a lot of the guesswork out of the equation when we're designing.

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Set the mood

Once we have most of the questions asked and out of the way, we like to start throwing together a mood board to start determining our visual direction. We always push to get substantial contribution from clients in this process to eliminate a lot of uncertainty. The documentation we receive back from the client after kickoff can fill in some gaps here and really helps get the ball rolling. In Palmer Market's case, the key words "Magnolia" and "Fixer Upper" kept coming up in conversation, so we had a good grasp of the visual style they were looking for.

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Making Old Things New Again

Now that we have an agreed upon visual direction, the fun process of designing a logo begins! In most scenarios, it's good to sketch out ideas, but in this case we jumped right into Illustrator to get some ideas out. Depending on the scope and length of the project, we offer a different number of logo options for the client to choose from.

Finishing Touches

With a final logo decided on, it was time to put on the finishing touches to Palmer Market's logo package. That includes giving them some deliverables of different sized logos in a variety of file formats.

In addition to those pieces, we packaged up several preselected color options to choose from and also ideas of logo usage to give some brand context.

Final Thoughts

This was such a fun project to work on and we're even happier that we were able to find a great partner in Palmer Market. They're continuing to do a great job executing the brand we set out to create together. Go and check 'em out!

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