At around (and I say this loosely as the details are a little foggy) 2006 or 7, I started a couple of sketches from a photo I had of my mum.

My parents were visiting us from the UK, and Mum seemed a little pensive and distracted from what we'd been talking about. I remember she was sewing at the same time, us sat around the dining table. I forget exactly what we were talking about, but I think the topic had turned to a reflective note. I'm not entirely sure what made me grab the camera, but the photo seemed to capture an emotional interlude, and a sort of fleeting sadness.

Now my mum is a tough lady, unfazed by troubles around her. She'd always just coped, made things better, just got on with it. She was (and still is) incredibly pragmatic, in complete contrast to my daydreaming. Needless to say, when I was younger we battled a fair bit. You know what they say about an irresistible force meeting an immovable object? Yep, that was us. But now there was plenty of water under the bridge, and we'd buried past quibbles. I'd grown up and realized that she was right about more then a few things (damn it!). Yet here was an unexpected moment of fragility. I guess it had always been there underneath. I just hadn't noticed…

I'd put the photo away, and came across it several months later, a little surprised at having missed it. After some sketches, it seemed that a painting was needed. And this time, I wanted to try something big (or as big as I've attempted so far). I must say, it wasn't easy. I restarted, and then restarted again. It took a few years, on and off, between other pieces of work. 

At around this time I'd been reading Howard K. Bloom's Global Brain, among other books, and was influenced by the depiction of cells and organisms seemingly following a small group of commands to gather, compete, explore, gorge and resign and how this could be extrapolated to almost any aspect of life. It might be hard to see, but the idea was that I could use that; painting ever smaller circles or strokes within each other to create more or less detail as I needed. Each section would compete or absorb or harmonize with the next, and this would directly relate to the object itself. The surface of the skin. My mum's unconscious insecurity.

Skin is particularly fascinating in this regard, especially skin that is worn in a bit. I'd painted my Gran's smile not that long ago and this was pushing it a bit further. It was a mixture of that painting (a style, so to speak, that I'd used a lot) and the bokeh-type refusal of focus from the painting of Stephan & Juergen. As you can see with the progress shots, I had a bit of a thing for Chuck Close—and it was practical, too; I needed to know where I was placing the marks and this was as good a way of doing it as any. 

I put the last brush mark on some time in 2009, not long before my daughter was born. And life changed just a little. 

He was quite intense about sports. In the early days, when I was first (nervously) getting to know my father-in-law, we would go to the bowling alley, or play badminton, and you could tell right away that he drove himself to excel. He didn't just play sports.

Later—after I'd gotten rather ill in New York— I ended an aquired reluctance to be sporty that had lasted for years, and I decided to take up Tai Chi. 

I found a master on 23rd Street (Master William C. C. Chen, an original student of Grandmaster Cheng Man-Ching), and started practicing most days. It was William who kept me interested and going, picking up variations on form and teaching me the subtleties on our trips to Singapore. On a rare visit from my wife's family to New York, he came to the Tai Chi studio to meet the master that had been teaching me.

Even though he's a bit frailer these days, through age and Parkinson's, he still has incredible strength and agility. Despite the disease, his technique is ineradicable, and he just keeps going.

I get bested every time, and I'm still learning from him.

The Design

It was clear from the beginning that we needed a clean break. We even switched the color scheme after realizing the one from the old logo just didn't fit (even if it did carry a part of the old identity forward).

We discarded everything and started from scratch.

I had a realization it was going to be a lengthy project: there was no real system in place for putting the identity into printed material, or online. Infact, there were no designs for these at all, and Veron had been coping with whatever she'd had on hand. That meant designing not just business cards, but letterhead and envelopes for correspondence; logo's in different sizes for conferences and handouts (with digitally appropiate formatting as needed); invoices for, well, invoicing; and a new website. A big list, and naturally some of this is still in progress...

A part of this (and a whole 'nother project) was the creation of a second identity to sit alongside Masso Institute. Veron has a range of oils and gels (custom blends and single pure strains) that she relies on heavily in her practice. 'Veronica Aromatherapy' is different from the Masso system, yet it's under the same umbrella. You can see that project <here>.

The First Phase

So, I may have got a bit carried away in the beginning: about 200 variations or so later, and it was a crazy mess to look at. Only thing to do: cull and group! 

I split them into 6 major themes so that we could quickly discard whole swathes in one go. For that first presentation, I did my best to explain how and why I'd designed them (practically and visually), so that it made sense for Veron. I ended each theme with a selection on business cards so she could see them in action (and could print them out and get a feel for them in the real world).

We quickly zeroed in on the script-like letterforms. Both of us agreed this was the strongest area, aligning nicely with the company, and with the most simple and descriptive forms.

The Second Phase

After narrowing down the selection, it was time to develop the chosen theme further. There were 2 main forms (a herringbone-like one and a script-letter version), and I expanded and refined each one, concentrating on the weighting and style of the lines. I had to do some research on typeface construction at this point. Both were predominantly letter forms, after all. I took cues from type and calligraphy, and tried to account for clarity and rhythm within each.

I wanted each version to be able to work in black and white first,  color later. 

Both were made of one undulating line, to reflect the idea of massage and movement inherent in the treatment. Terminals were thinned, connections were sharpened, and the bowls of swashes and loops were enlarged to allow for legibility under many circumstances.

It was here I started introducing the companion logos for the Veronica Aromatherapy oil brand so that they'd sit well together from the beginning. Above you can see the initial 2 versions of the Masso logos (Herringbone and Script) with their Veronica Aromatherapy counterparts.

Another Element

Originally just the logotype, I had a sneaking feeling that it was not quite enough, and late one night I had an idea for another element in the design to complete it. 

I added a vein-like element, influenced from the lymphatic network that Veron had talked about (nearly always shown in green—see below left). There are associations with natural structures and the eye (a tidy circle with the logo in the middle), and the diagrams used in diagnosing color-blindness (see below right). Both of these would end up influencing the color of the final logo.

As a corollary to the Masso logo, the Veronica Aromatherapy logo got an extra element too (see the sketches above right).

The background ended up doing a funny thing; it sharpened our decision for the logotype. We decided on the looped herringbone-style logo as it fit better with the veins. It had a naturally more pictographic quality, and the veins flow more naturally from the letters. Although the flow of the script letters were nice, there was something a bit too rigid and standardized about it when juxtaposed against the veins.

Next was color… green was the obvious choice to mimic the biological diagrams, but that shade was a bit too obvious. Once you're thinking of coffee, it's hard not to! So I tried a few options:

I think the logo worked in black and white quite well (which was my original aim), but adding a definable company color way was important too. So much of a company's identity is rolled up in the color choice, even if it changes over time and in certain contexts (think Coke's red and white, or Nike's orange). So, for now, I changed the green to a soft aqua green (which already, at least in the US, has a medical feeling), and added a bright mid-orange as a complementary in the 'MI'. This had the added benefit of aping the color blindness charts (see above), and pushes the letters forward by visually bouncing off the blue-green veins.

In the final iterations, I softened up the aqua green and the orange a touch, partly out of necessity for 4-color printing of the business card. Above, you can see several size variations, including a delicate blended version on the right for printing or displaying very large. The type was balanced to match each size, being readable without overwhelming or being overwhelmed.

Below you can see some of the final printable material: first business cards, then letterhead, invoices, envelopes and others. The business stationery was transferred to Pages and Numbers so that Veron could adapt it as necessary. 

A Quick Note About the Type...

I experimented with the type a bit, but it was a relatively quick decision to go with Brandon Text (you probably recognized it from this site). It has a unique quality of being both modern and historic at the same time. It's a geometric grotesque, hailing from the same family as Futura or Gill Sans, both made in the 1920's. Neither too aggressive or cold, passive or decorative, it fit well in the mid-ground that Masso was placed, professionally and therapeutically. 

The text form of Brandon has a higher x-height than Hannes Van Döhren's original Grotesque version, and was perfect for the smaller text of business cards and letterhead. As a bonus, it's hinted well for the screen and so, when I get around to it... *cough* website!

Body text for the stationery was set in Avenir.

Image Colophon:

Lymphatic System diagram:

"Blausen 0623 LymphaticSystem Female" by BruceBlaus, Blausen.com staff. See "Blausen gallery 2014". Wikiversity Journal of Medicine. DOI:10.15347/wjm/2014.010. ISSN 20018762. - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Color Blindness Image '6':

"Ishihara 11". Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Poster for PSCCC Rainbows' Art Show

The Rainbows' classroom (my daughter's class) at the Park Slope Child Care Collective was arranging an Art Show as a big celebration of the crazy amounts of artwork that the children had made that year. Iris and Dawn asked me to make a small poster to persuade parents and friends to support the cause. I couldn't help going to town on it! 

The brief, again, was pretty wide open. I was aiming for something that looked homemade and used many of the same materials that the children had used for their artwork. It was a great, fun project. 

Big thanks to my wife for the idea (and help) with photographing the children as letters—it was the genius bit that tied it all together…