Rebecca and I (Dave) like to think of ourselves as artists first, business people second (...or are we parents first, artists second, business people third?!). In other words, we run our company from the perspective of our own target market, so we just design and market authentically, making things the way we would like to see it.
Some basic psychology went into our branding:
Pink is pretty, warm and makes us happy (it's our daughter's favorite color.. lol), and a heart represents love of course. Prettiness, happiness and love... who can resist that?
In my past life working in video advertising, I used to think of my new assignments in terms of what basic emotion I wanted to elicit. People rely on emotion more than they rely on information to make decisions.
The perfect video advertisement will evoke a strong emotional response, show a logo and connect it to the overall emotional experience, and then get out of there!
Anything can be sold via emotion... you can sell with fear, happiness, sadness, love, comfort, longing, envy, sex, anger, disgust... just make the viewer FEEL something. To be very honest, I would usually lean towards a combination of happy and envy with a touch of passive sex. It can be very simple to achieve this; for example, create an atmosphere that is unattainably perfect (e.g. smiling kids, a pretty face, just the right music) and you can sell anything—even if it has absolutely nothing to do with what you are selling.
This is a demo reel of mine from 2014 when I was still in the industry:
So anyway, why the heart in the ArtResin logo?
This logo was born from a conversation between Rebecca and I in a coffee shop one afternoon long before we had kids (when we had time to sit in coffee shops together all afternoon!). We looked at ourselves as artists and asked, what do we like? what are we attracted to?
For us, it's pretty simple: life must have purpose and beauty. We want to leave the world in better shape than when we arrived. We want to make other people happy and give more than we receive. We love being creative and we want to facilitate creativity wherever possible, in ourselves and others. We want to love and be surrounded by love.
We believe that we're not unlike most artists; artists by nature have a similar longing to make a difference. In fact, isn't that the job of the artist—to challenge the status quo? To shine a light on injustice and make the world a better place? Hence our slogan, "Spread the Love!" ...a play on the heart theme once again.
A heart therefore seemed like the obvious choice, and with a quickly scribbled line, Rebecca drew our now-iconic heart with a resin drop inside.
Funny enough, we've been told it looks similar to the Air B+B logo, just upside-down! ...But we did it first, in 2009! :)
So now you know why our logo has a heart in it. :) Do you like it?
ArtResin: Made For Artists, By Artists.
