The main sign for the Hazelnut Inn is undoubtably the most important as it will set the tone and be the first taste of the experience guest will have in this place. The final design came about after much discussion and many tries. It is said that designing for yourself is the hardest thing I'm a believer! But the end result is well worth the struggle.
From the first concept two things remained the same - the tree and the lettering. The challenge was how to make the sign read well, stay in balance with the tree and have it look good as a double sided sign.
For a while we played with the idea of including a scroll to fit in with the other signs for the inn. But our thoughts were that it made the lettering far too small for such an important sign.
So it was back to the original design and experimentation with different colours.
At this point we considered placing the tree inside a barrel with the lettering across both ends...
We were then back to the oval shape but extended up a fair amount. The tree got a little more detail at this point and went from a plasma cut silhouette to a full 3d sculpt. We were getting closer.
Then we pulled the whole name of the sign to the bottom of the sign. Everyone liked this idea much better but all felt the sign still needed something to take it over the top.
In the end it was a project I did twelve years ago that inspired the solution. That was the door to my studio. We decided to still start the tree inside an oval but have the leaf canopy extend over the top of the sign.
So I redrew the design one last time and this time everyone in our family immediately said YES! In the next post in this series we'll begin the work of designing the routing file. Stay tuned...
