January 12, 2012

When you hear the name Martha Stewart, I’m sure many things run through your mind; from her going to jail, her only daughter bad-mouthing her in a new book, to her impeccable array of home and craft accessories.

From a design perspective, I find the branding of her collections to be some of the most sleek, beautiful, modern and consistent looks out there. She has created so many branches of her empire with the various magazines, crafts, linens, pet accessories… the list could go on forever… and yet they each have their own identity and at the same time feel very “Martha Stewart-y”.

Stephen Doyle is the creative director at Doyle Partners and was the man in charge of creating a new logo for Martha Stewart. He was given a brief before starting the process that said this: “The handmade, the homemade, the artful, the innovative, the practical, the contemporary, and the beautiful. We are not just about lifestyle, but about essential tools for modern living. Not just about the how-to, but about the why-to. We aim to inspire the creativity that can transform homemaking into domestic arts, or a simple dinner into an occasion—filling our lives with a little more quality, a little more permanence, a little more lasting beauty. We are not just a company, but a laboratory for ideas and a community celebrating the art of the everyday.”

He chose to emphasize the “handmade”, “innovative”, “practical” and “quality” requests above all else when rebranding this logo. He first began, as most designers do, by creating a handful of logos that used her initials and an icon but found that “some kind of abstract flourish, would have diminished” the power of what the logo could be. He went back to the drawing board and recalled his favorite photo of Martha, near a barn with a wreath of fall colors and said, “it seemed natural to transform the Martha Stewart name into a wreath”.

The wreath of letters began to resemble a coin and “this new idea hit upon the ‘quality, permanence and lasting beauty’ part of the equation, subtly suggesting that this public company was valuable, dependable, and bankable. Awwww, yes… the subtle meanings behind logos are what make a great designer and yet the public doesn’t realize the impact it has on their purchasing decisions.”

Stephen took this typographic wreath/coin and decided that in order to capture the “handmade, homemade and artful” aspect the brand desired, he would carve the words by hand into a plaster disk, which gave each letter its own imperfections and personality.

This logo gets criticized on design blogs over and over again because of these imperfections and his reaction is “Yes, exactly! It is not meant to be perfect.”

Logos with their own character, simplicity and ultimately the strategy behind it, is what I strive for when I’m working on each of my designs. This story’s process is inspiring when I’m struggling for just the right look of a company.

handmade, innovative, logo, Martha Stewart, typography