Every day is Valentine’s day when your logo is a heart
Much like our company itself, the story of our logo is one of opportunity born of crisis. In May of 2010, we were put in a position where we had to design a new logo very quickly. It’s a bit of a messy story, and a difficult lesson about the pitfalls of working with friends. Long story short, we had no logo with an impending print deadline to have labels on time for a production run. There was no time to find a new designer, and we had already spent what seemed like a fortune on artwork we could no longer use.
We only panicked for a moment before we had a bit of a “ruby slippers” moment. There was no reason we couldn’t do it ourselves. I had a lot of classical art training and was still clinging to the idea of “making it” as a visual artist (to be honest, I still am). Alison, in her free time, drew elaborate and detailed patterns as a meditative activity. Why shouldn’t we be the ones creating the image that would be shorthand for our entire brand?
The process of designing the new logo took about 10 hours of work. My contribution accounted for about 30 seconds of this. It was the night before I was supposed to fly to California for my brother’s
wedding. In a flash of inspiration, I sketched out a preliminary version of the Evermore heart. It was rough but fully captured the concept. I texted Alison a photo, and she spent some time over the next few days meticulously drawing various detailed iterations.
Some aspects of this dynamic have persisted throughout our partnership (she’s definitely edited this blog). The morning of the wedding she texted me some options.
It was instantly clear which one was the winner. When I returned home from the wedding, we paid someone to create artwork files of the logo (in retrospect way too much for what I now realize was also a 30-second process). From there I taught myself enough Adobe Illustrator to redo our original labels and have handled all of our graphic design since (with some help from my partner Noah and Youtube).
The Evermore heart is imbued with meaning. Apart from the obvious connotations of a heart, it consists of one single line. For us this symbolizes connection and is a love letter to our dogs, to our customers, to our vendors, and to each other. It also speaks to the connectedness of sustainable agriculture, and in particular the interdependence of the land and the animals whose lives are sacrificed for food.
Through the lens of design convention, the Evermore heart definitely checks off a few of the “don’t” boxes. It certainly doesn’t have the boldness or simplicity of the Nike swoosh. As far as text-based logos go, it’s not exactly instantly legible. That said, rules were made to be broken, and the things that are “wrong” with our logo actually convey a deeper truth about who we are as a company. Our logo is both complex and quirky, but understated. We’re not the first fresh food company you will find, but if you look a little deeper, you’ll find us and you won’t find anyone else quite like us.