The Story Behind My New Logo

A cool thing with my logo font is it’s a messy, blotchy typewriter one, which I think rather cooly combines both the fact my blog is about writing and I’m shit at things like spelling and grammar. Even the auto-correct functions seem to work against me. Although, to be fair to myself, I do most of my writing late at night when I’m tired and usually go back in the following day to fix things up a bit.

I have new respect for logos.

I remember when the Commonwealth Bank came out with their ‘Sao with vegemite’ logo in 1991 my buddies and I had a chuckle and thought we could do better, but I’m ready to take that back now.

The fact is, I’ve been trying to work out a logo of some sort for my blog for sooooo long. All I could think of, whenever I decided to work on it, was a lot of stick figures – and I mean a lot of them.

All attempts at coming up with something myself have ended in beer. I am totally useless at computers and, except for an apparent flare for embarrassing myself in anecdotal stories, have not a single artistic bone in my body. Even my stick figures are crappy.

Wanting this pretty bad though, I even occasionally made inroads into those logo sites which kept popping up in my Facebook feed, and recently approached a designer for a quote.

You might be wondering why I want a logo in the first place. The answer is simple – I’m needy.

I’ve been working my blog for nearly six years – since Fathers Day in 2010 – and it’s a been a lot of effort for, if I’m completely honest, not much financial return. Sure, I get the occasional sponsored posts now, which I genuinely enjoy because it’s fun to get a topic to write about, and they’re super super awesome for meeting the skyrocketing blogging bills, but this blog is more a labour of love. I just like to write my little stories and interact with everyone who ‘gets me’ and likes to snicker at the absurdity of raising kids and feels a bit the same way about parenting and relationships and life and love. Outside of my family, my blog is the bestest, most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.

And I really have to insist on saying thank you to you for that. I have not doubt it wouldn’t be as much fun writing if no one thought it was worth reading our exploits.

So when last weekend, finally, with a lot of help last weekend from Mikayla, I managed to etch out a logo I love, you can imagine how excited I was.

Strictly speaking, and we don’t use this term around here, Miki is Master24 and Miss21’s wonderful stepsister, from their mother’s second marriage. I’ve got to say, that Miki even likes to come and stay with us occasionally is a matter of great joy to me. She’s lovely and intelligent and great company. Plus, she understands we’re family.

And, as it turns out, the type of family who’s good to have around, because she’s also hell good at design and computers and design programs.

Something I learned when she came up with Master24’s great logo for his Goof Review site, where he reviews tabletop games – his guilty pleasure.

For my logo I decided it had to be simple. I didn’t want Big Family Little Income written in it. Plus it had to be me – personal somehow. Because the blog isn’t a business with products and shelf space in supermarkets. It’s just me writing stories.

A big thing was that I wanted something I could use as a watermark on photos. Plus, I wanted something to slap onto the side of our bus (assuming we can find the right one in time – that’s a whole other post) for our trip around Australia next year.

So last Friday night I just sat there at our dinning table beside Miki, answering her questions and looking at her screen and saying no a lot and yes a bit and getting super excited when we hit upon this. The ‘big family’ bit are capitals and the ‘little income’ bit are lower case, playing off a bit on the big and little motif. I like it.

At one point, Miki playfully put a handlebar moustache under BFLI lettering.

“That’s it!” I said. “I love it.”

She gave me a little sidewards look.

“But…you don’t have a moustache,” she pointed out.

I reached up to make sure.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, remembering in fact I’ve only ever had something resembling a moustache once, and only for Movember.

From there we hit upon my glasses as an actual thing still on my face and it all just flew on from there. Well, we briefly considered my chins, bung eye and huge nose, but the glasses seemed to make more sense.

We added my favourite colour and kept ‘Big Family Little Income’ reduced to four letters, the ‘i’ of which reminds me of Maggie Simpson.

Seriously. Go look. I’ll wait here.

Then there’s the glasses work because the blog is about reading something – it seriously just sings for me.

So there you go. Hopefully, I can figure out how to use it effectively and you’ll see my logo more often. Hopefully.

But no promises.

As stated, except for stories full of spelling and grammatical errors, I am pretty shit at a lot of this.

Raising a family on little more than laughs

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