We took it to the next level and she even added a few drops of her blood to the metal before smelting the silver for my ring. I designed the wedding ring with rainbow saphires on the top rim, and black diamonds on the bottom.
The wedding armband has an imprinted heart-shape pattern round the side.
Above are a few pics of the ring, the armband, and her high-fiving just after the ceremony. Was such a fantastic day!
Woah, it’s been a while…
Since my last post, I have quit my job as marketing manager of Virgin Active SA and am now working on Dunk Island in Australia with Jen. (check out www.thejeffiner.wordpress.com to see travel blog info).
I brought a bunch of jewelery making tools with me to the Island and have been working on an engagement ring and also a wedding band for a friend of mine back home.
It’s quite tricky working on something so far away and in different time zones, but I’ve decided to make a few options and send them over so he can choose which one will work best for his “wife to be”.
I will upload some pics once I have them finished.
Check out the view from my new office! 🙂
Here are some of the initial business card ideas…
Looking at the original logo you can see how it has been made by cutting a circle at different points.
This gave me the idea of creating a whole rocco font which was made from circles cut the same way. I wanted to do it myself coz it would be great to say I actually made that unique font , rather than requested a designer to do it for me. It’s the worst excuse in the world, but I didn’t have time to learn photoshop in 2 weeks while moving out of the flat and finding a tenant, quitting my job and sorting out everything for our planned move to Australia for a year or 2 of travelling.
So, I asked Isabeau to create it for me… It came out fantastically…
It really looks great and I am excited to use it going forward, but I do regret not trying to rush the process before I left and actually taking the time to do it myself. There are some things you need to outsource, but others you need to do for yourself.
On the upside, my version prob wouldn’t have looked as slick 🙂
What a cool process – It’s like designing a person from scratch… what they look and sound like, what their sense of humour and personality is etc…
I had a pretty clear idea in my mind about what I was looking for, but to bring it to life you need a talented designer:
Enter Isabeau. She did such a killer job with our wedding invites and knew exactly what we were trying to achieve (check out www.thejeffiner.blogspot.com) there was no doubt she would crack the rocco identity…
One of the ways to help crystalize what you want is to create a feeler board. When doing this I noticed a common thread in some colours that were re-occuring… black and yellow. That would be the ‘corporate’ colours. After giving her pages of feeler boards, reference pics and talking her through a bunch of ideas, she went away and came back with some initial scamps which were almost spot on…
We tweaked the writing to make it a little chunkier (we tried rounded edges but it started to look a bit like comic sans and there was no way on earth that would be the rocco identity!)
Also, the initial logo icon (above) was too contained… I wanted the icon to represent the creation of energy, rather the containment of it… more of an explosion, than an implosion… kind of like the toxic waste logo, but not…
Isabeau then went off and crafted a bit more and came back with the following options…
I was sold on the initial logo identity – clean simple and open to be interpreted however you like… another big consideration was if it could be practically made into a jewelerry stamp to put onto each piece… this design seemed like it would work very well…
In the meantime I was trying to buy the rocco.com domain name but it was taken. After actually looking into it – it seems that existing platforms like blogs, facebook, twitter etc are suitable enough to have your online presence… websites aren’t as NB as they used to be and mainly serve to drive traffic to these other platforms. Plus, now I dont need web design skills or hosting fees etc.
rocco 