It's Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday - everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend...
...no? My bad, I thought that Rebecca Black’s hit “Friday” was everyone’s favorite end-of-the-week jam. As happy as I am to wake up and welcome the last day of the workweek, it is often one of the hardest days to be productive. So, how do creative minds stay motivated? Listen up, no pun intended.
My favorite way to get inspired, pumped, excited, and motivated about a project is music. I’m the kind of person who listens to the beat of a song, never fully registering lyrics unless I am on song count 500. Maybe it’s because lyrics can often be disappointing; I don’t like to ruin a good beat.
Why is this relevant? Music captures and channels my creative impulses and is an important influence on innovative vision. People are affected by music because of its rhythm. Our bodies have their own rhythm, from our heartbeat and breathing patterns to how we walk and blink. It’s only natural that we would respond to the rhythm of music around us.
Genius and creative imagination are fueled by high frequencies of vibration. Music brings your mind to a higher place so you can see more of everything and increase your thought frequency. This allows creativity to run freely and charges your thoughts by energizing your body and waking the mind to be original. Listening to a variety of music with differing tempo evokes emotions and can help you coax your most imaginative ideas.
My flow derives from a variety of music outlets, in which I wanted to share. Do you feel the vibe?
And for those days you often find yourself facing a blank screen, try GLEE – it’s a refreshing slushy in your face.
You can develop great ideas the same way musicians compose music; through in-depth exploration within a specific field. So if you want to become a great creative thinker, listen to your favorite music and dive into your business; in my case, world domination through consulting, branding and design.
Lastly, I leave you with this:
“Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does." —David Carson
Rock on world.
-Darcy Crowell, Director of Operations
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Farmgirlfit is an exclusive gym for women, providing non-traditional workouts and personalized training in a group setting. With the slogan “women’s fitness reinvented,” we knew that Farmgirlfit needed a powerful and unique brand identity to live up to its core concepts. We put our creative minds into full gear to mold Farmgirlfit into not only Spokane’s newest gym, but also its most powerful and unique.
Through custom logo development, original website designs and creative marketing collaterals, by the time we finished, farmgirlfit had more strength, endurance and mobility than their workouts.
Beginning with the most integral part to any brand, we wanted the FGF logo to make a statement. Like other successful sports brands, including Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Puma and so on, a simple, yet strong logo is not only recognizable, but, more importantly, memorable. Drawing inspiration from the typical chicken/rooster comb look, the Farmgirlfit logo translates into a cool, modern, serious female sports brand, while also retaining the message of a “farm girl.”
From the logo, came the business cards. With the same chicken/rooster comb design as the logo, the business cards added consistency to their brand, while also having a distinguished and cutting-edge look and feel.
Among other collaterals such as an informational trifold, banner, t-shirt designs and more, our team created the foundation of their social media presence with custom Facebook profile pictures and eflyers.
With humble beginnings, Farmgirlfit, as a brand, possesses power, strength and endurance. Be sure to check out their website to see more of our work! Farmgirlfit.com
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Owner, Patrick McPherson, had one solid vision of his soon-to-be restaurant: commemorate the old historic stone bridge of Manito Park. Working off the key phrase “Tap House” and drawing inspiration from the unique rustic and vintage feel of the bridge, we began developing the most integral part of Manito Tap House brand: the logo.
Replicating the oval shape of a beer tap handle, we knew from the first round of logo designs that we were on to something. Incorporating a muted selection of mustard and red colors, we changed the typical round shape of a tap handle to a hexagon and made the stone bridge the focal point of the logo.
From these logo designs, option 3 proved to be our favorite. With big, bold block writing, the logo was almost there, but a little tweaking was still needed. Replacing the side beer hops with barley leaves and accentuating the shape and width of the bridge with darker colors and shading, we finally had our Manito Tap House logo.
With the finalization of the logo, our creative juices were flowing more than ever. We immediately began work on other Manito Tap House collaterals, such as the Facebook profile picture, t-shirt designs and more.
And there you have it! From the historical stone bridge of Manito Park to the new hotspot on South Hill, Manito Tap House is here to stay.
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Cool, huh? Check out these new Timeline features from a few of us Turtles!
Regardless of whether the public is strongly abhorrent to change, many big brands and smaller companies update their logos for one main purpose: reestablishing and leveraging their brand identity to the next level.
We at TPT recently unveiled our new logo at the 7th Annual Spokane Cobra Polo Classic, and were very pleased with our fans’ response. Taking a contemporary twist on the classic turtle shell, the new TPT logo reestablishes our brand identity, uniting sexy with sleek and creativity with revolutionary. To fully appreciate the simplicity and elegance of our new design, we thought you might enjoy a behind-the-scenes look into the creation and evolution of the new TPT logo.
The Purple Turtle brand drives our team’s creativity, so when the first idea of modifying our logo was suggested, everyone was beyond excited. Envisioning and creating a holistic appeal for our new look required lots of methodical thought and careful conceptualization. Eventually, we were able to narrow down our key concepts to three main components: puzzle, network and structure.
PUZZLE: Whether it’s personal identity or complex branding projects, we at The Purple Turtle pride ourselves on offering solutions to meet and exceed our clients’ needs. All of those elements have to be in sync to achieve the ultimate success of launching and leveraging businesses, which brings us to…
NETWORK: In order to provide our clients with solutions, there is a consistent streamline of communication between our staff and other various worldwide partners. This communication focuses on exploring and finding all the potential solutions to solve a client puzzle. The grey lines represent our networks in between each piece of the puzzle and our ability to connect those networks properly.
STRUCTURE: The fusion between puzzle and network brings us to our final component of structure. As our networks explore all the potential solutions to solve the puzzles, this process simultaneously provides structure to not only our client’s brands and businesses, but also to The Purple Turtle. Essentially, it is structure that ties everything together to both our logo and business as a whole.
As you can see, at the heart of our new logo retains the elements that have been true to The Purple Turtle since the very beginning: taking care of our clients. Our new logo is not a change in the principles of The Purple Turtle, but rather a strong and meaningful update to ensure that we continue embracing our core values, while remaining poised for future growth.
With our new logo, we have the freedom and flexibility to explore the many channels of applications that coincide with The Purple Turtle brand. Exploring these different types of extensions of TPT allows us to stay relevant and in step with our wide range of current and future connections, clients and networks.
So, whether you see our new logo on wine bottles, CD covers, desktop screens or wherever else, we can say with complete confidence that our audience will be able to recognize and connect the Turtle mark on both a national and international scale, regardless of any language barriers. Most importantly, our new logo is an inspirational step forward marking a new chapter of growth that will keep both you and I intrigued in the future of The Purple Turtle.
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It’s that time of the year again – back to school! Although we may not all be running around picking up shiny new school supplies like most teachers and students are, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get ready to learn. With the turn of a season and the start of a new school year, now is the perfect time to learn and soak in as much knowledge as possible. What’s the best way to do that? Copying.
Yep, we said it, COPYING. From a young, tender age in school we learn for one reason or another that copying is bad. Teachers especially burn it into our naïve little minds that those who copy are slackers, lazy or cheats. However, the fact is, those who copy are actually the most intelligent ones in the class.
Now, don’t get too carried away. At TPT we are all about putting in enough study hours to learn and understand the material inside and out in order to ace the test. By copying, we certainly don’t mean plagiarism. Rather, a better word choice would be, REMIXING, but we had to get your attention somehow didn’t we?
In a recent web video series created by New York-based filmmaker, Kirby Ferguson, he proposes that the act of creation doesn’t transpire from inspiration, like most people might think. Creating something spectacular actually comes from applying ordinary tool of thought to existing materials.
Sounds fancy, right? Think about it this way:
In other words, emulating the style and ideas of others helps us learn. We learn from past success and failures of both people and companies, and then are able to take that knowledge and fuse it with our own ideas and experiences. We join the remix.
When ideas remix that’s when we experience revolutionary breakthroughs.
The point is the world is essentially one big blender full of great ideas! Carefully studying and learning from others will help us connect and, eventually, remix brilliant ideas together, resulting in a great leap of creative innovation that will go down in history forever.
Since we are in the school spirit, please put your pencils down and eyes forward as we watch Kirby Ferguson’s short film, “Everything is a Remix.”
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