Logos and Symbolism

Photographers as any artist almost always need to brand or signify in some way that the work displayed is something of their creation. Otherwise, they are totally reliant on the client saying who created it and that’s not always possible, if the image gets passed on, the client passes on, or more commonly in this day and age of the internet the image is shared and passed around or found in a search. There are always some who will argue don’t brand your work, but if you don’t, how does anybody know it’s ‘your’ work?

From my point of view, it’s interesting to watch how branding by photographers is changing or rather I’m seeing certain trends coming and going. In my case, I’ve rebranded twice, but each time it’s been a case of building on the previous brand design.

The first rebranding was the addition of the graphic stylised script ‘L’ to help make the logo more easily identifiable and hopefully obviously based on my surname. However, it had problems.The logo was designed to be used in the bottom right corner of any promotion/image, except by design it could ‘only’ be used in the bottom right corner. it also could not be used by itself without text, and I’ve always had the desire to have some self-branded clothing which led to a rethink of the graphic element. The next design shift was influenced by my interest in symbolism, something I’ve been interested in for some time, and that various things, shapes and images sometimes have specific underlying meanings. Think Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” or wedding traditions like “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”.

So the graphic does pay homage to the grand traditions of symbolism, being loosely based on the ‘trefoil’ a symbol used to denote the Trinity in my faith (You might be more familiar with the use of the fish symbol for Christianity) but also done like a Celtic knot in a nod to my Scotish heritage.