Setting up my editing business branding from scratch
How could I come up with a logo that suited me and my business?
Problem: I needed my logo to be…
- very simple – something that would be clear and recognisable as a browser favicon
- very versatile – easy to scale, easy to adjust colours as usage (and personal taste) dictated
- totally relevant to my business.
TL;DR: what I chose is a classical typesetting symbol, that represents the craft of creating a book, from structure to readability.
Simplicity
The symbol I chose is everywhere, and yet invisible. You will probably have seen it in your word processor while writing your book. It looks a bit like a backwards letter ‘P’, and it’s called a pilcrow.
Try opening a document in Word, and look at your toolbar for a button that looks similar to my logo. You’ll see all sorts of light blue symbols, including dots for spaces, lines for page breaks… and pilcrows. It’s a simple and clear figure that is instantly recognisable.
Versatility
I had already chosen a colour palette, so I simply made a selection of png files which used the pilcrow in plain and simple two-colour combinations.
This means I had an extensive palette range, so I could use the same logo but in a colour scheme that suited the medium I was on. It’s a simple outline, so it can be compressed into a small filesize without losing detail. It can have a transparent background so I can drop it onto any materials that I create for the business, like my editing stylesheets or feedback documents for clients.
Relevance
The pilcrow is such an everyday feature of word processing programs that writers – my potential clients – will remember seeing it in that very specific context and there’s an immediate association with writing.
“Oh, yeah, that’s that thing I see at the end of paragraphs. I wondered what that was…”
By the way, it has a long and interesting history. It originated in medieval times as a way for scribes to indicate where new paragraphs should begin in handwritten manuscripts. Back then, books were written without any breaks between paragraphs, which made them difficult to read. By adding a symbol to mark new paragraphs, scribes made texts more accessible to readers.
Over time, the pilcrow became an essential part of typography, right up to today.
But the pilcrow isn’t just a practical symbol – it’s also a symbol of a writer’s craft. Someone has taken the time to carefully structure their writing into discrete chunks that make sense on their own and as part of a whole text.
That’s the goal, right?
It may be a small symbol, but it’s an important one that has played a big role in the development of written language.
Plus, little bonus for me: my editing and book layout business name is Pretty & Precise, so there’s a close visual link to the double-P, too. That makes me smile.
Quick link
Continuing the books theme this week (well, most weeks, to be fair…), here’s a cool quick video from Penguin Random House, showing the process of a book from manuscript to bookshelves
Scenes from a book: the publishing journey
What stage are you at in your book journey? Check out my Services page if you’re wondering what to do next.