A Logo for Maine.

My new logo for the US state of Maine has begun to roll out in the last few weeks, and it's a thrill to see it.

It began in early January 2023 with an email from creative Jordan and VP Neal at Miles Partnership, asking if I'd like to have a stab at updating the logo for the state of Maine. 

Now all I know about Maine can be summed up in three points: 1. Our friend, the poet Andrea Gibson was born there. 2. It's huge and beautiful, and 3. Stephen King!!! 

I said yes and within a couple of weeks was hashing out some proposals. The Miles team had made my job easier by carrying out acres of research with the inhabitants of the state itself. They'd got a stack of feedback on what they liked about the original logo, what they didn't; what living in Maine meant to them, what they thought of when they pictured their home state, and hundreds more answers to in-depth and nuanced, thoughtful questions.

The existing Maine logo looked like this:

The core feedback was that the logo felt "outdated, bland and uninspiring, particularly among Maine visitors". When asked what the new logo should be, the answer that came back most often was "bold" - but with the near-unanimous caveat that it should nod to the traditional nature of Maine.

The findings came to me in an extremely thorough 45-page document which formed the backbone of my thinking. 'Organic, craft, charm, outdoors, nature, wood, trees, breathtaking, rustic, authenticity and sustainability' were other pivotal words which came out of the research.

And that was plenty for me to go on! I had the final logo in mind almost immediately, but presented lots of different looks to the team. After all, sometimes it's just as useful for the client to see what they DON'T want as it is for them to see what they do. All but a couple were analogue, made with ink, crayons, pens and pencil on paper, I was keen to communicate movement with solidness and history; contemporary energy with tradition. 

A still from one of the WIP videos I made while working on the logo.

While wax crayon, used to make a resist version.

Here are a few of those initial suggestions - there were a LOT. I do this because, at this stage, the client could spot ANYTHING in an idea which triggers the final outcome - so I tend to leave very little out; I guess you could call this a brainstorming of sorts:

Preferred options were 'put to research', and after a few weeks a trio was isolated for further tinkering. And by tinkering, I mean the start of the fine-tuning process - without knowing which the final choice might be. This is things like examining the weight of letters, kerning, trying different options on 'e's and capitals, whether on a single line or a little bumpier, like this exploration:

Often at this point the client's curious to see how my very analogue work will look when transformed into vector art (presuming we're working with art that wasn't created digitally to begin with).

This isn't a 'click the button' or 'apply that filter' step - rather, I do this via a series of processes which sensitively and carefully change the format of the piece (from pixel to vector) without changing its nature, preserving its human warmth, detail and idiosyncrasy. Without blowing any of my hand-sketched  trumpets, it's often why people come to me for logos; in a sea of Canva-generated/off-the-shelf/plastic-looking logos they want something very obviously crafted by human hands, but which functions in every format, at every size, and performs in any technical, screen or print environment. I've been doing that a long time, and it's surprising how that need has remained consistent.

Here you can see a close-up of a very carefully vectorised version of this inky option:

This option from the second round of ideas was chosen to get through the third round. Made with simple, freely-drawn capitals in ink on paper, it worked as well in colour as it did greyscale and vector:

And as a partner suggestion to this I made a version created separately with ink and pencil to hint at cut wood, wood and trees being things that emerged as strongly connected to Maine and eliciting affectionate responses in their research group. Here's the raw art before any refinements:

Watch some of the process here:

At this point, I got The Tingles - when you know underneath you've cracked it, and you desperately want the client to agree with you...but you daren't hope too hard, because your experience tells you it can go completely in another direction! But those Tingles came when I played with these layered and coloured versions. Suddenly, I could see this on all the signs, the site, the products, the T shirts...

The team liked it. But there was one more thing. I was aware from the start that when I said the word 'Maine' in my mind, it was actually 'Maine.' - with the full stop. I couldn't stop seeing it this way. I felt it communicated a confidence and pride in this single-syllable name, and suggested that the state was everything you could need - the full stop made it both a name and a statement. 

"Where you from?" 

"Maine."

And so it was added to the next round. Would they go for this punctuatively unusual choice?

The answer was YES. And so, over the course of six months, our logo was born, and final artwork was prepared in myriad formats and al the colours of the new Maine branding guidelines. In its final iteration, the logo is currently working its way over the next few months onto hundreds of products, signs, printed materials and online platforms, but you can see it right away on the visitMaine website, and on these satisfying examples.

To my delight, as well as embracing my 'thing' for the full stop, they're using both the flat-colour version and the textured version together, deploying them in different environments, and that in itself is unusual. I applaud their boldness!

If you live in Maine and you see it about, please take a snapshot and send it to me! "Out in the wild" has become a cliché, but only because the thrill of seeing one's work out doing the job it was created for never gets boring. 

Not for me, anyway.

Thank you to the brilliant team at Miles Partnership in Denver for bringing me on to do this prestigious project, especially VP Neal and Jordan, and thanks to my agency BAreps for their patient, professional cheerleading!

Avon Called!

Cosmetics, jewellery and perfume mail order behemoth Avon asked me to create illustrations that worked with and around the model for their new fragrance range last year, in a campaign which has just gone live.

The 'Eve Become' quartet of fragrances consists of Truth, Privé, Confidence and Eve; each created to reflect a different aspect of the wearer. Taking their cue from womanhood and everything the word can mean, and presented in beautiful, contemporary glass bottles, the scents offer alternative vibes depending on your mood on the day. The company needed a collection of images that spoke to the changeable nature of femininity. 

Working with UK-based One Production, I went to London on the day that the PM resigned - definitely the topic of the day while we had our introductions - to be present at the campaign's photo shoot. Peering 'behind the curtain' of the hours-long process was a thrilling treat - I've been on site for all sorts of ad and photography-based things, but not a shoot quite like this. After a coffee or two I got to work sketching live on my iPad as the models went through their day, having makeup applied, hair tweaked and clothing pulled into place around them (with two very appealing dogs to entertain us in between takes - see below). Those girls were impressively professional - young, skilled and infinitely patient!

Surrounded by a team that included photographer, stylist, lighting team, director, photo editor and a catering and logistics squad, I wove my way in and out of the action Procreating spontaneous sketches. Not intended to form part of the final ads, these were made to capture a vibe that would inform the work later, back in the studio:

(Her name was Margeaux, and she was enormous!)

Back in the office week or so later, the selected photos were sent over to me and the work began. We'd already explored some ideas - two sets of suggested looks, one digital and one ink-made - so we had an array of looks to base the final pieces on. Here are some of the analogue tests:

And here's a handful of the digital pieces. These ones I absolutely loved, because they're very much in the realm of the kind of work I'm really into at the moment - free, energetic, and with a delightful amount of spontaneity!

One of the things I'd offered to do as part of this job - in fact, something I offer all my clients now - is capture the process of making the work. This is a brilliant thing to do for two reasons; first, the client gets to see the process, which can not only help to shape the final outcome but can be really useful for communicating how long something might take, and what's involved in adjustments, and second, small snippets of film can add incredible value when it comes to social media and passing those 'peeks behind the curtain' into the client's audience and customers. So the pieces for this campaign were captured at almost every stage, in closeup, for integration into the final ads:

The process of developing final pieces was a delightful sequence of back and forth between myself, art director Rich Gent and the Avon creative team, wrestling with the edges of ink, line quality, and just how organic the art should be. In the end, the final pieces were a mix of real sloppy ink on paper and digital work - maybe you can see which is which, maybe you can't!

This little gif was a tidy example of how the team blended my

live capture with video and stills from the shoot.

Thanks to Rich, Lottie, Lesley and Melanie for involving me, and to my agents at CIA through whom the job arrived. It's become one of my favourite jobs ever!

A Cautionary Tale...from myself, almost 20 years ago!

I've done a fair bit of digital archiving and backing up recently, and I found this article I wrote for the AOI in 2003. The incident it refers to happened a year or so before, even so; the fee will make your eyes water!

I've posted it here as it made me laugh - at my belligerent, horrified self - but it was a reminder that I still think illustrators need to be bloody careful. This could have happened today - companies will still royally try it on, more often than not these days in the form of a 'competition' in exchange for 'exposure' or those special shiny social media coins - you know, the ones you can't spend in shops! At least I was offered fifty quid! (oof).

I also chuckled at the mention of a faxed brief - I loved my fax machine. Getting one, in 1996, meant I was finally 'on the radar.'

Finally I was tempted to name Company X. But the professional in me still says no. I might be tempted to yield, however, if enough people ask...

Enjoy.

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A cautionary tale to warn the unwary illustrator: Sarah Coleman reveals how even an experienced illustrator can strike a bad deal.

This is the tale of a momentary lapse of reason, a failure to apply the Golden Rules of Illustrating and the burning cheeks that followed.

I'd worked for Company X before, a creative and enthusiastic team with an approach to briefing that wasn't my usual:

      "Here's the theme, do what you like, no real rush, ideas finished or half-developed, invoice us for whatever you think is appropriate when you send the work in. We may or may not pick out bits we want to use and if we do, we'll pay you again to publish it."

With an almost entirely editorial/design background, I was used to a faxed brief (sometimes, if I'm lucky, treated to an art director's 'helpful' sketch at the bottom), a pretty tight spec and a quick deadline. So this was bliss.

I knew that the fee for any use of the work was bad - £50, to be exact. I also knew that this was a company with a turnover of millions. But somehow, the client filtering software in my head had managed to overlook these things. Now don't get me wrong. I knew what I was doing. This was the same Sarah who

was neck-deep in a fierce court battle involving hundreds of thousands of pounds and winning. This was the Sarah who threatened to turn down years of work with a major magazine group unless they deleted the copyright section of their contract: they deleted it. The one who refused a fabulous wrap-around book cover because they just weren't paying enough. But my enthusiasm, and my belief that the exposure would give my portfolio a turbo-injection meant I was able to start work, fully aware that we'd signed no contract. I can even say I was probably a bit flattered by their requests for so much work. (Oh! The shame!)

Now a lot of the work, though well received, was never used. But I wasn't prepared for that which was to show up in every branch up and down the country, flying off the shelves before my very eyes as I went shopping. 

It turned up on my own Christmas presents, wrapped by an unsuspecting friend. 

My students told me they'd seen their mums stockpiling my 'Best Wishes' paper. 

At a quid a sheet, I began to get miffed about imaginary royalties, and much time was spent gently kicking my own shins that I had failed to negotiate some modest royalty or at least a worthy publication fee. I soothed myself with thoughts of how nice it looked in my folio and of how a momentary lapse of reason wouldn't confuse my business head again.

So by the time sample copies of a brand new gift wrap dropped through the door almost a year and a half later, I had long decided I wouldn't work for the company again. The note accompanying the samples asked me to submit 'my invoice for the £50 publication fee.' The horror of what I'd done - or not

done - rendered me incapable of acting on the invoice for several weeks. I almost wrote it off, fearing that my foolishness in not doing things properly would be best kept unacknowledged by both me and the company concerned.

But a quick check in the middle of the night confirmed what I had thought: no contract, no fee agreed, so still open for negotiation - right? Five minutes on the phone to the AOI and I was sufficiently galvanised. They might have stuck it on the shelves already, but there wasn't a thing to say what I could expect to be paid for it.

I was surprisingly anxious about calling the company, but wasn't surprised to learn that the girl I'd worked with was only too aware of how bad the publication fee was.

The designer was helpful but ultimately handcuffed by a fee structure clearly never influenced by anyone involved in the creative side of things.Royalties were completely out of the question. The four-figure sum I quoted as a second-best option was equally hopeless. Eventually, the fee paid for the original A3 board of ideas was doubled retrospectively with the £50 publication fee on top. I explained that although I had loved the organic and relaxed way I had been asked to work, their publication payment was appallingly low. 

In response the designer explained that Company X did appreciate that after a while 'developing illustrators' became 'priced out of their market and moved on to bigger and better things' - which burned a little, having spent the best part of a decade earning a living as an illustrator - but I understood the sub-text: you might be too posh for us now, but there are many more who'll think this is a great deal.

The invoice was re-submitted with a prominently-positioned reminder that the copyright stayed mine and any secondary or future uses were subject to separate and further negotiation. Meanwhile, the burning face is subsiding. You, Company X and I are the only people who know about this, and I'm using home-made paper to wrap my presents this year. 

You of course can get a nice sheet of funky gift wrap from any branch of Company X for a pound. Don't buy it. The real cost to illustrators could be far higher.

~ This article first appeared in the Association of Illustrators Magazine in 2003. ~