The first thing I do when I get a new logo client, is ask them some questions about their business and I get a general feel for the image they want to convey. This is extremely important when building a logo. If a company has a traditional product but want an edgy look..that’s important for me to know.

After I get a good idea of the direction we are going I sit down and I spend several hours doing research on logo concepts and images that can be associated with the industry of the logo I am creating.

Next I pull out my trusty pencil and pad and I start sketching ideas, no matter how insane or off the wall. This helps me get the juices flowing. Once I start getting a few ideas flowing then I head over to the computer and start bringing those ideas to life. This is often the hardest and most time consuming part of the whole process. I have to turn my sketches into workable graphics there is no tutorial or class that can teach you how to do it. Ultimately its an enormous amount of trial and error.

Here is my logo concepts for a new garden and gift shop company. That asked that I create several logos ranging from mild to wild.  In the end we were able to agree on a logo that we were both happy with.

Flowers:
This logo was fun to create. I made this logo about the same time I had to create the “Up Your Skirt Ale” logos since I had so much fun with the “T” on that logo I decided to plant the T on this one.

Modern:
I wanted at least one of the logos to be modern and  sleek. I used a modern clean san-serif font and used earthy muted colors. I also dropped the “u” in trug and replaced it with a modern looking trug.  Artistic:
This was my third design. I again used the “Trug” from the first logo and placed the word Garden in a trug of its own. In the end as much as we all loved this logo it was just a little to much for the vast dynamics that their logo would be used.

I hope you enjoy them.

X-mas Card 01

X-mas Card 02

On the biggest shopping day of the year when much of the world was bustling about to jump start the Christmas Holiday, Sage took a few minutes to sit down and talk about her new album and the deep introspects into her soul that it contains.

“It just what I do,” explained Sage “the way some people write in a journal or play sports. I write songs and every single one is different and at a certain point when I have ten or fifteen I consider putting them all on a record.”

Musically, Sage’s voice echoes a passion merged with a solitary angst to an unjust world and a rage that explodes on to the keys of her piano like a venomous force. Its with an inviting soft purr that she delivers her poetic sting of words. She explained that early in her career she was apprehensive about forming a band.

“I thought I could never be in a band because I don’t scream my head off. I had my concerns about playing with a drummer, because in high school that one girl or guy was like the big loud voice that got in front of the band and sang rock and roll at the talent show, and there I was writing very intimate, personal, kind of poetic songs.”

Her poetic style, however, is what has propelled her to international fame. Her soft and gentle tons rather than ear piercing screams has lead her into a new world of classic style music, which blends the Renaissance style romance with a millennial kick.

“I am defiantly aware of the dichotomy of my music. I think that is what is so great about the marriage of music and lyrics. I can write a poem about my feelings and it sits there on the paper and it alone wouldn’t really come to life or be as universal as when I put music behind it.”

Sage fuels her poetic anthems with a background of her fiery piano playing, an instrument that by the age of five she had began teaching herself to play while developing a style all her own. She fondly remembers a renegade accompanist who played Beatles songs with classical arrangements, which Sage would pound out by ear.

“When I was little, I wanted to do it all, I wanted to sing, I wanted to dance and I wanted to act. One didn’t seem to preclude another to me until I had to make a decision about what I wanted to do with my career. My folks were very conservative in their beliefs that I had to have college to fall back on. At that point, more weight shifted to music, it was something I had always loved as a child. The last thing to go by the wayside was my acting, in just sort of a time management kind of thing. But I hope to get back to it all somewhere down the road.”

Sage is a modern day renaissance woman. She is a pianist, singer-songwriter, poet, and visual artist, who has never shied away from a healthy challenge, including founding her own record label Mpress Records, which will be releasing her fifth full-length album Public Record.

The fourteen songs on Public Record are each individually wrapped in a perfect little bow. The album rumbles off with “What If” which is a dark spoken word rhyme asking the age old question of “what if?” while charging forward with lyrics like “what if there is no one who I would put up with/ what if there is no one who would put up with me.”

While the album is laced with titling morsels of ear candy over all it seems to echo the reverb of a jaded love. Nestled between the upbeat “Brave Dancing” and the twangy growl of “Ambitious” is the jazz funkdified fusion “Return to Freedom” which delivers a message about being lost in love and finding the way back to freedom?

“Return to Freedom was a poem that I had written in my journal when I was touring in Germany.” She explained “It was just a little spoken word piece that I didn’t intend to be musicalized. I tend to start a lot of my spoken words pieces with a question because it is almost like a journal entry for me. I did the song acapella  with a spontaneous melody with my drummer just playing a loop.  A year later I was in the studio and I had a late night session when I just wanted to mess around with a lot of the stuff we had done on the road, but I hadn’t pinned down any of it musically so I was just like play some shit and in that session I cut that and “what if” with just the drummer and myself.”

Sage credits much of the albums driving hip hop sounds to her drummer Doug Yowell who as she said would wait for her to throw lyrics at him and he would match her lyrics with a groove that would take the music to a new place far beyond what even Sage had envisioned for it.

She said that the journey to Public Record was somewhat shrouded in secrecy as she recorded much of it on the side while preparing for the release of last years Illusions Carnival. She said that while working on Illusions Carnival she was frustrated with the production process and more so with the lack of connection between her and the projects co-producer. She explained that unbeknownst to her collaborator and anyone else she was working on some other tracks. Sage called the project “secret record” mainly because she didn’t want her co-producer to feel threatened by recording tracks on her own. She said that as time drew closer to begin work on Public Record she put her secret project on hold and while laying tracks for the album Andy Zulla, who co produced Public Record joked at her “secret record” stash. She said that in a round about way she made the commitment of keeping her feelings open, and in a sense making her music public.

For more information on Sage check out her website at rachelsage.com.