The creation of our hand-crafted bookouture logo was a labour of love, but also an exercise in priorities.

Designing any kind of logo is always tricky.  Yeah, it’s only one or two words… but how do you get that one graphic to represent everything about your business?

Well, here’s the trick – you don’t.  It is only one or two words and maybe an icon after all.

With bookouture we had TONS of things that we wanted people to know from our logo:  We’re digital publishers, we specialize in entertaining fiction for smart women, we’re clever, creative, commercial, and really good fun, good looking and generally fabulous people to boot.  Oh, and modest.

Unfortunately we couldn’t think of a way of getting a logo to say all of that.  So we settled for three things.  Stylish, feminine, and distinctive.  And of course in terms of the practical stuff, it had to be simple and easy to read in order to work well online.

We decided on hand-drawn typography to tie in with the very essence of bookouture and, well, because we thought it would look kinda cool.

Our awesome designer / typographer was Claire ‘the Queen of Type’ Coullon.  She provided us with three pretty different options as pencil sketches, and of course we liked bits from all of them.

After a little time playing around with different versions (Claire describes the process much more articulately here) we decided to share where we were at with the world.  You can see all the comments on Dribbble – a fantastic ‘show and tell’ site for the design community.

We got TONS of feedback and suggestions, and the great news was that everyone seemed to like where we were heading.

With a few final tweaks to take into account everyone’s comments, we were ready to unveil the final logo…

We’re delighted with the final result – and we hope you like it too.