New Work: SVWC logo

Every sum­mer the lit­er­ary world con­venes in pic­turesque Idaho for the Sun Val­ley Writ­ers’ Con­fer­ence. Anchored by the event’s key speak­ers, the con­fer­ence brings together both writ­ers and read­ers to dis­cuss lit­er­a­ture and con­sider its future. Aware that the con­fer­ence had become one of the most pres­ti­gious events in its indus­try, SVWC real­ized it was time for a new iden­tity to match its stature. That’s when they called us.

Armed with clear direc­tion from the client, our logo devel­op­ment began in typ­i­cal fash­ion with page upon page of thumb­nail sketches. After a lot of graphite and inter­nal debate, we selected 12 sketches to develop fur­ther. Our objec­tive was to pro­vide a range of solu­tions for the client to con­sider: from sub­tle evo­lu­tions of SVWC’s exist­ing mark (what the client requested), to con­cepts that were com­pletely fresh and unex­pected (what we always strive to deliver). As is often the case, some of the ideas didn’t trans­late well from sketch to com­puter, so 12 became seven, which then became five.

When we pre­sented the five con­cepts to SVWC, they were instantly drawn to the mark that graph­i­cally com­bines rays of sun with the pages of an open book.

Our efforts imme­di­ately turned to refine­ment: giv­ing the logo a sim­ple and time­less ele­gance that the first ver­sion lacked. The form of the book was an impor­tant part of this process—straddling the line between sun­rays and book pages was a chal­leng­ing exer­cise. Addi­tion­ally, the client wanted to adjust the hier­ar­chy, giv­ing more empha­sis to “WRITERS’ CONFERENCE” and pulling it away from “SUN VALLEY.” Not want­ing the entire lockup to become too tall and stacked, we switched the type­face to a wider serif that gave the entire piece a more united feel. Through­out the evo­lu­tion of the new logo we retained the gold and cop­per tones to com­mu­ni­cate a sense of rich­ness, time­less­ness and the warmth of Sun Val­ley.