Houston Area Lending
Houston Area Lending was a veteran owned and operated personal mortgage services company. The owner, Derek Hahn, came to Bluberry Creative searching for a fresh look, and I was part of the creative team that came up with the initial concepts for his new logo. After the concepts were pushed through several rounds of revisions, the HAL team finally selected a logo that best fit their vision; servicing tailor-fit loan programs one house at a time.
Role
Graphic Designer – Bluberry Creative
Categories
Logo Design // Identity Design
Finding the Right Strategy
The logo process for Houston Area Lending did not have an easy start. I struggled to come up with something original that didn’t look like every other lending company logo out there. It wasn’t until I started to think more about how Derek saw his and his company’s future that I began to land on ideas that had some real traction.
Finding the Right Strategy
The rook, or rather castle drawings came from the phrase “a man’s home is his castle” while the stacked letters was an attempt to give the logo a more modern or “cutting edge” look like a lot of homes try to shoot for these days. Ultimately, however, the Houston Area Lending team settled on the perspective concept that was based in the precise linework of a perspective drawing.
Following that, it was my responsibility to refine the perspective concept for a second presentation where we would hopefully settle on a logotype. None of the four perspective types was precisely what the client was looking for, but they did like parts of specific concepts that would later become the final logo.
The bold perspective would become the base, but borrow the window idea from the balanced perspective and take the space of the angled perspective’s window. After introducing color, my creative director and I came up with the night and day concept so that the logo could be easily used on light and dark backgrounds without needing to always be a flat, one-color shape. The logotype suites below was the final product that was presented to the client, which is now used on the Houston Area Lending website.
The bold perspective would become the base, but borrow the window idea from the balanced perspective and take the space of the angled perspective’s window. After introducing color, my creative director and I came up with the night and day concept so that the logo could be easily used on light and dark backgrounds without needing to always be a flat, one-color shape. The logotype suites below was the final product that was presented to the client, which is now used on the Houston Area Lending website.
Lights On – "Nighttime" Suite
Lights Off – "Daytime" Suite
