The Whistling Monkey Logo And Starswelove Relaunch Plan.

I have really had a productive week. Considering I was sick all of it, I managed to design three brand new logos that i am absolutely in love with. I have been trying to pick up a lot of tips and critiques in a bid to utilise them constructively in my creative processes.There is so much to learn and just one of me. I wish I could clone myself several times over, as I am sure all of you must have mused at some point in your careers. Trying to find time is a constant struggle for me and as a result I am learning to work faster.

Last week marked the 10th anniversary of our baby Starswelove.com . Nick and I started this website as a learning tool and a medium to provide quality celebrity scans to fans in the first year of our college. From leeching bandwidth off free servers to hosting the site on a server that proclaimed itself unmetered for $20 a month [from where we eventually got kicked out because they hadn't foreseen a client like us who actually maxed them out] to finally graduating to our own dedicated servers, Starswelove grew from a handful of static gallery pages to a mega celebrity site boasting 1200 celebrities, over 10,000 photographs, movies and a newsletter subscription base of 20,000 fans. At its peak in 2004, Starswelove was amassing almost 7 million hits a month and was ranked around the 25,000 mark on Alexa. Then we had kids and the rest they say is history. The internet changed and evolved in the time of our hibernation as parents. As we slowly crept out of our warm caves, shaking off the cobwebs of sleep infused ignorance, we were slapped by the cold winds of social media explosions.

We have a certain responsibility to Starswelove, a soft spot for our very first website. So we have decided to give it a fresh breath of life on its 10th anniversary. That in itself is such an exciting thought, since we are also working on a brand new user-driven website to be launched later this year. The first thing on the agenda for Starswelove was a logo, it never had one. So I set about giving it a logo that would suit what it stands for. I wanted to incorporate love and the glitz and glamor of celebrities in the logo. I ended up making a 3d heart, a landmass mapped with stars on display on a holographic disc which also doubled up as a halo for "we" making the fans into angels for the love, adoration and worship they show their stars.

The next logo that came out of my sleep deprived mind was called "Wingmetrics" and it is up for sale on Incspring. I have been trying out an abundance of spirographs in the past few weeks and ended up making one I really liked. It was a wing made up of smaller wings and had a gorgeous palette of purples. The "wing" in the logo symbolises freedom or flight and "metric" is a measure of that freedom, the ability of a brand to soar and reach new heights … quite philosophical if you may.

The last is my personal favorite. It is the uber cool primate that I wish I had a business idea for, because he is so sassy and tongue-in-cheek, my very own "Whistling Monkey". This gorgeous green-eyed guy is for sale on Incspring too. I thoroughly enjoyed sketching his puffy primate cheeks and the perfect pout. I’ll let you in on a secret, I can’t whistle. No sir, I can’t produce a melodious sound when I pucker up my mouth. The only sounds emerging are "pfft pshhh" and that’s about it. So I really do admire this monkey for what he can do.