I wanted to share some inspiration behind the site! I love reading design blogs that share their clients’ inspiration boards; in particular, I recently enjoyed THIS ONE by Breanna Rose and THIS ONE by Noirve. It’s a great way to peek into the design process — how ideas form, starting with images and color palettes, and evolve into the final product.
So, here is my inspiration board for Owl Ink!
I really like birds in general, but owls are my favorite! Since I wanted the name “Owl Ink”, I thought I’d stick with the nature theme and use a color palette that is inspired by the forest and mountains — an owl’s natural environment! I had fun looking for the perfect images that depict my vision for the site. The three images were found on Pinterest, and unfortunately did not link to actual sources.
In terms of fonts… well, first I had an ambitious idea to hand-letter my own font, but quickly realized I did not have that much experience yet… so I will likely save that for a future project/blog post. Of all the free script fonts I found, I loved the slightly sharp, yet still graceful feel of Roskrift, so that’s my logo font until I can hand-letter my own! I am currently crushing pretty hard on Montserrat (it’s all over my personal blog), so that was a no-brainer. Then I picked two sans-serif fonts for the body text. It appears that Quicksand only shows up on certain browsers, so the slightly taller Trebuchet MS is my second pick.
For my logo, I really wanted to tie the “OWL” side and the “INK” side together. I knew some awesome pen and ink related logos off the top of my head already, so i just went on dribbble.com to find some inspiring owl logos and icons.
1. The Pen Addict 2. Wise Design by Mike Bruner 3. Owl Icon by Nicholas Petersen 4. Fountain Pen Day
I sketched a few ideas out in pen and pencil (A Uni-ball Signo and a soft Palomino Blackwing — my new favorite sketching pencil :D) and thought of different ways to tie the concept, name, and visuals together into one cohesive logo. I had the idea of combining the body of the owl with a pen nib, and went from there. You can see here that the owl evolved quite a bit before I settled on the current style!
I hope you enjoyed this peek into my creative process! Thank you for reading! :)