Sometimes Things Come Easy

Then There Are the “Other Times”

A couple years ago, I had the pleasure of working with David and Mariah McIntyre on the brand development for their new stylish restaurant in San Diego called Crescent Heights. After meeting with David and Mariah and discussing their vision for their new restaurant, I immediately had a clear idea of one of the logo options I wanted to present to them.

David is very much an artist and his new restaurant was going to be contemporary in its look and feel, but I wanted to also capture the artisan touch of the chef. To best accomplish this visually, I decided on contemporary type married with a brush stroked monogram done by hand.

[hr]Creativity comes from the care-free part of all of us…[hr]

So there I was, at my desk, with my brush, ink, and a few sheets of paper ready to knock this logo out.  As I began, it didn’t take long to realize, it wasn’t going to be that easy and I was already far from the point of “knocking it out”. After the first 25 or so throw away monograms, I was thinking to myself, “that’s ok, these are just some warm-ups” but by the time I was at somewhere around 150 throw-aways, I felt as if I were 2 more failed attempts from karate chopping my desk in half. Needless to say I was ready to move on and had just told my wife that I thought I was going to have to find another direction. As I said this to her, I absently drew one more monogram while barely looking at the paper. Wahla! There it was.

The lesson I learned on this project was that creativity comes from the care-free part of all of us. But when we become too structured, ridged, and have a narrow vision of the way things are “suppose” to be. We put up walls against our self, which ultimately keeps us from reaching our creative goals.

 

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