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Yesterday I mentioned that we’d selected 3 of the images Robert had drawn to take forwards, but while I spent time singing the praises of him just being able to sketch something, then photograph it and send it through, the quality is way lower than needed to take things further.

So today, while I’m waiting to receive those images, I decided to take a photograph of one of Catherine’s Schnauzers that inspired our company name, and run it through various filters and perform bits of photoshop processing to see what we could come up with.

So I took the picture of the dog, and separated it from the background, creating a nice little picture of the dogs head isolated from any clutter.

Then I ran in through processing to turn it into a pseudo version of a pencil sketch.

Although there’s some clutter left around it (guess I didn’t do quite as good a job of clearing away the background as I thought), it’s a very nice image of the dog looking dignified. But I really didn’t feel that was what I was looking for.

So I ran it through filters to turn the original image into a cartoon like version of itself.

Which I thought looked very pretty indeed. And finally, through filters to turn it into a painting.

Which I don’t think looks as pretty as the cartoon one, but still liked a whole load.

Now, being unsure of which I liked best, I decided to merge the cartoon one, and the painting one, allowing  the colours of the painting to show through, while the definition of the cartoon one is kept.

Now, this I liked a whole load. But it brought to our attention that maybe we’d made a massive mistake. While the above image is quite appealing, it looks like the logo for a dog grooming company. And looking through the logo’s for dog grooming companies, whether we decided to make the logo a cartoon, a photo-realistic image, or whatever, it would always stand the chance of looking like we were a dog grooming company.

So how do we move forwards . . . . hmmm . . . . something we need to ponder over for the night!

More tomorrow, hopefully with a solution.

Okay, firstly apologies for the clickbait title, was listening to a podcast this morning, and the idea stuck in my head, and the sooner these ideas are out of my head the better. Number 5 will not shock you, but you just may find it adorable.

So, Robert was good enough to sketch out some ideas on a notepad, photograph them with his phone and send them though. (Isn’t technology wonderful, while there are better ways of transferring data, this was perfectly serviceable, and was a darn sight quicker and cheaper than needing a scanner.)

Anyway.

First up a cute pup, love this little guy.

Second definitely fulfils the definition of a Scruffy Wee Dug.

This guy looks a total wee fleabag 🙂

Awww, he’s begging.

This one intregues me, peeking round the corner. Love the unbalanced nature of this image, the name and picture are out of balance, and that makes me look twice.

The duggy rampant, very heraldic. Makes me want to put a shield between this and a mirrored version to make our own coat of arms.

Okay, so lots of ideas there. We’ve bounced ideas around the team, and the first, second and fifth images are the favourite among the team, so we’re going to take those further. As soon as I’ve got some photoshopping out of my blood first.

More tomorrow in the continuing mystery of “How Scruffy Dug chose their logo.” Duh, duh, daaaaa. {a thunder clap rumbles in the distance as the titles begin to roll}.

So, we decided on a name, Scruffy Dug, something we thought showed our sense of fun, and was inspired by the two dogs sitting nearby as we discussed names.

While a staid, formal name would have been easy, this brought a smile to our faces, and if we’re going to work on something, having a smile is a good place to start. The scottish use of Dug, also helps mean we can grab the .com and .co.uk domain names without stretching the name out with a full title, or adding hyphens, etc.

So, next we need a logo. Without it, we can’t launch the web site properly, can’t write to anyone with any sort of unified, organised front, and can’t produce business cards, so won’t be able to schmooze.

So to start sketching, first up a cartoon dog.

I’m not the best freehand artist, but it’s kind of fun. But it’s clear I’m going to have to hand over to Robert for better quality freehand drawings.

But, never one to sit around, I took an outline of a Schnauzer (the Scruffy Dug’s mentioned above) and and just kind of scribble on them to make the outlines scruffy.

Which kind of works, but isn’t what we’re looking for. So with time running short, I just added some photoshop effects to make them a little disco and see what came out.

Neither of which are what we’re looking for, so guess it’s time to wait for Robert to hand in his drawings tomorrow and see where we go from there.

 

Just testing this works, hopefully this should appear on our Facebook and Twitter feeds too. More to come REALLY soon.

Please wait . . . . news soon . . . .