I am reach­ing a point where I think I need to brand my cre­ative ser­vices with its own web­site, port­fo­lio, and so on.  So I’ve been try­ing to brain­storm some busi­ness names and con­cepts I can design the site around.  I haven’t really hit on any­thing solid yet, but here are some of the ideas I’ve bounced around on my IM list and in my own head.  Sarah’s tired of hear­ing about them, so now you get to instead!

“Monster Stomp Studios”

Logo Concept:  A daikaiju mon­ster from a low angle, lift­ing a mas­sive foot to DESTROY!

Tagline:  “Small Studio.  Big ideas.”

Disadvantages:  I am not the world’s great­est illus­tra­tor, and I want a car­toony illus­tra­tion for that logo, I think.  Like a chibi Godzilla knock­off.  So I’d prob­a­bly have to out­source the illus­tra­tion to another designer and that doesn’t look good on my main work site to have done that.  I need the design to be com­pletely my work.  So if I stick with this one, I’ll have to really work hard in sketch­ing and illus­tra­tor to cre­ate a good logo.  I need to learn to draw bet­ter anyway!

Write Design

Site Concept:  Natural media, paper, pen­cils, inks.  Lots of edi­to­r­ial style marks on things, cor­rect­ing typos.  Focusing on the writ­ten word.  Great typog­ra­phy, lots of handwriting.

Tagline:  “Design solu­tions for authors and publishers.”

Disadvantage:  My con­cept is mean­ing­ful, but there are a mil­lion Write Design web­sites out there.  It’s too com­mon of an idea, and I almost cer­tainly won’t be using this one, which is sad because I like the idea of mak­ing a web­site with real paper.  Which leads me to the next

Little Fish Big Pond Studio

Logo/site con­cept:  con­struc­tion paper!  Blue sea back­ground, styl­ized fish and other sea cutouts here and there.  Maybe some javascript  ani­mat­ing a few mov­ing around.  Masthead involves a bunch of lit­tle fish in a school,  with one solo fish a dif­fer­ent color out lead­ing the pack.

Tagline: “How do lit­tle fish sur­vive in the big blue sea?  They stick together.”

Disadvantages:  A few other design com­pa­nies out there using a sim­i­lar con­cept.  This one posi­tions me specif­i­cally as being a small busi­ness designer, which may be a niche I don’t want to put myself into.  I really like the design con­cept though, and now I just can­not help but want to build a site out of con­struc­tion paper cutouts.  It would look awesome!

Other ideas/concepts that aren’t ripe yet:

• some­thing that can play on sci­ence fiction
• some­thing spin­ning off of Roundbottom?
• some­thing super grungy and crunchy
• some­thing that I can use my pho­tog­ra­phy skills for
• Something about Kansas, using the tall grass prairie as a design element
• dinosaurs! (no, I don’t know what that means)

It’s hard work being a cre­ative genius, but someone’s gotta do it.  Eventually, I’m going to hit on the per­fect con­cept that’s going to show my skills at their best.  I know it.  I just need a bit more time and thought.  Advice is gladly accepted.

Tagged as: business, freelance, Web Design