Colormusing is me! (Wow, that sounded ungrammatical.) That is, it’s the name I’ve given to all my collective work, once it finally dawned on me that color is the major common element in everything I do.

Designing a logo for yourself is so much more difficult than you’d think, primarily because you really can’t separate yourself as an individual from your professional identity. And in fact, it took me over 2 months just to settle on the name Colormusing. But once I had that, I developed a kind of logo design brief for myself, thus:

• I wanted to convey simplicity, i.e. working with color doesn’t have to be intimidating, as many people seem to believe. To me, simplicity translated to black and white for the majority of my logo. (And I also liked the slight tension created by having the word “color” in black.) The clean typeface also underscores simplicity.
• I wanted it to be fun, hence lower case letters.
• The light bulb, forever associated with having bright ideas, seemed appropriate, especially as an illustration of the “musing” part of the name. And being able to use it in place of a letter connects the two concepts of ideas and musing even more.

Once I had the Colormusing name, I felt I needed a tagline or slogan, something that would clarify what I do. “It’s all about hue” still isn’t very specific, but at least it says what my focus is on, and the play on words also demonstrates that color is a topic that doesn’t have to be taken too seriously.

The colors of the little circles over the light bulb are also significant. First, they’re from the very first color palette that I designed specifically as a palette— the first time I started thinking about palettes as a specialty. Second, going from one end of the circle sequence to the other (either direction) takes you through a color sequence, demonstrating my theory that if you’re starting with 2 completely different colors, like my gold and fuchsia, it is possible to connect them via a graduated color sequence so that they work together harmoniously. This is an essential concept that I apply to virtually every project.

As I hinted in the first bullet (above), I take a bit of perverse pleasure in the idea of the Colormusing name being rendered almost entirely in black and white. It’s unexpected, but at the same time, to me, it just feels right.