What will be my business name?
Believe it or not but this was one of the hardest parts of the process. Before I had JCD I was freelancing under the name of ‘JackCass Productions’ of which you can see above – this was when I was 15 (I’ve learned a lot since then). This was a clever pun of my name Jacob and Cass. I get called ‘Jack’ and ‘Jake’ quite a bit for my nickname instead of Jacob and when you combine the nickname Jack and my last name Cass… well, you get JackCass or jackass if you will.
I actually got very mixed feedback about this name ‘JackCass Productions’. About 50% of people loved it and 50% of people would say “why would you want to be called that”? There were pros and cons for both however in the end I chose not to continue using JackCass as the name and I think I made the right choice but in saying that I still have the domain jackcass.com just in case.
Ok, so now I had the problem of choosing whether to brand myself as my name ‘Jacob Cass’ or another name. Obviously I went with the latter however I still bought the domain name jacobcass.com. But now what to choose for my business name? I decided I wanted something unique, I wanted the word design in the title but I also wanted it to include my initials in the name if I could – ego, I know.
I had a million ideas, as you do… Jucy, Jaycii, JayZee, JayCee, Jaci, Jaysee, JayCee, JaySee, JaiSee, Juju, Juca, Joco, Jluc, Jaco, JC, JLBC and I won’t bore you with the hundred more that I had.
Sketches
I couldn’t come down to a name I liked so I just played around with my initials to make a logo and you can see the sketches (to the left) of me trying to get J and C to work together. There were six A3 pages so I had to take a photo of it… it is 2mb if you want to look at it full size. Just a word of warning, I am no Picasso.
From these sketches I had the idea of trying to make the initials JCD into a pencil and after a bit of experimenting I got it to work.
Throughout the whole process I was up in air about the name of the business so I played with the names JackCass, Jacob Cass and Just Creative Design.
Illustrator
After getting the initial idea I experimented in Adobe Illustrator (the industry standard vector software) with different typefaces, sizes, proportions, etc. which you can see in the pictures below. I did this to see what typefaces worked and what line widths and combinations worked best together.
More play with the pencil idea…
The Final Two Concepts
I then finally came down to two styles, one which was the led pencil style and the one shown below.
At this time I received feedback from peers and from forums and many people told me that there was so many logos that incorporated the Fibonnaci Swirl. After a little research I found this was true and this meant that my logo would not be unique so I went with the led pencil idea. It was here that I tried to get the best size for the pencil to show off the JCD initials as well as making sure it looked like a pencil.
Font Change
I ended up choosing the third size down from the top however something was not quite sitting with me and I narrowed it down to the typeface. I changed it to the typeface I used in the other example which was the font Delicious and knew that was the brand and look I was going for. It was a great logo that was scalable, memorable and worked in black & white.
More info: What makes a good logo?
Colour
After having an effective logo in black and white, it was time to add colour… I narrowed it down to the blue or the pink that I originally had in mind and then I chose out of these four colour combinations. I felt pink had more energy and was not so corporate and this was the decision I made. Pink, grey and white were my colours and my brand.
Award Winning Final Logo
Above you can see the finished logo and I couldn’t be happier with the feedback I have received from everyone on this logo. At least once a week I get someone complimenting it which gives me a warm giddy feeling inside. Oh, and it incorporates my initials into it 
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