interiors by deborah roush

We met Yuba City interior designer Deborah Roush earlier in the year and together we began working on getting her business branded.

Deborah has years and years of experience helping individuals transform their houses into homes and she realized it was finally time to have a brand identity in place. After designing her business a professional logo and print advertisement (that was published in Me And Mine magazine), Deborah decided she wanted to further her branding efforts and so we got busy designing her new business cards and, perhaps most importantly, her first website!

After going through a logo design process with us, nearly all of our clients have wanted to move forward with us designing them websites. In the past we declined. While Billy can do minimal web coding, his passion, our passion, has always been design. We didn't want to offer a service to our client that was time consuming to us and something that we didn't love to do.

That changed when (thank God), Tandem Web Solutions came into our lives! Thanks to their web experts, we now offer our clients web design because the team at Tandem will takes our website designs and develop them with up to date coding.

I would honestly say that the most common mistake we see business owners make in their branding efforts is inconsistency. The logo looks like it was designed by one person..the business cards look like they come from somewhere else, and basically everything looks unrelated.

Being able to now offer our clients both print and web design ensures that their branding efforts remain cohesive. All business collateral is interconnected, and in this unity, they push forward the brand message versus diluting it through mismatched collateral.

To learn more about Deborah, we encourage you to stop by her site! You can also view more of the work we have designed for her right here.

Heads Together Salon & Day Spa

Yesterday Linda Lomeli, owner and hair stylist of Heads Together Salon & Day Spa, emailed us saying that her sign was officially installed at the salon.

Needless to say we were giddy with excitement and we drove by the salon 3 times yesterday to admire it!

Great job, Linda! It looks amazing and I can't tell you how thrilled we are to see you reinforcing your brand image on the salon signage!

You can see that even in one color the logo still holds its impact...that's the power of good, clean design!

a peek into the process

"The big problem is that the speed with which this machine (the computer) operates is so fast that the normal contemplative time that one needs to do a design that makes any sense is not there. When you're sitting and drawing, you make a stroke and you fill in areas. There's a time element involved. But with the computer, that time element does not exist. It takes up your physical, spiritual, and psychological time and your design time is just not there." -paul rand

Believe it or not, a frequently asked question by our clients is, "Will my design be original?"

Sadly, amateur designers and clip art/pre made logo sites along with crowd sourcing sites have left many business owners with an unclear idea of what quality of work they will be receiving when making the decision to invest in a logo design.

At Different By Design, we have a thorough design process that you can read about right here.

Every logo we design is uniquely created for our specific client and designed to solve the problem we describe in detail when we write up our client's design brief.

Having a design process vs. just hopping straight onto the computer and moving bits and pieces around is crucial to a good design. I believe famed graphic designer Paul Rand states it best in the quote above.

When choosing a logo designer for your business, make sure that the person you are using has a valid design process that starts (after a consultation and thorough knowledge of your company) in a sketchbook.

While we typically do not share sketches with the client during the process, we most definitely start all ideas in our sketchbook. It is a great part of the creative process to get any idea out on paper.

The reason we do not usually show sketches to clients is because the client hired us for a reason. We are professionals. We understand the elements of what is going to make a great logo design across all applications. Sketches are simply rough ideas and we know better than anyone the concepts that will actually develop into the best solution for our client.

Though we usually present 2 (sometimes 3) logo concepts to a client, we never recycle design ideas. We assure our clients that the work we are creating is specific to their needs and their defined values.

Above our some of the sketches we created during the conceptualizing/sketching process for our client Heads Together Salon & Day Spa. I love seeing how everything comes together for the final result.

"When to use computers is certainly as important as how to use computers. In the school environment, they should be a part of the curriculum but not the curriculum: nothing can replace the hand in the early stages of design education." -paul rand

Hope you enjoyed the tiny peek into our process!