The past few months have been quiet ones for me.

It started without intention—summer was on the horizon, I’d sent out my holiday schedule notifications and figured clients were off managing their own vacation time and slower schedules. I didn’t push things, figuring it’d just be a little lull before things picked back up. But that pick-back-up part never happened. Things stayed slow, and I kept my head down, filling the time in ways that felt semi-productive. The sun was out, the weather was warm, and I was tackling that back-burner stuff that never got done when things were busy. It felt relaxed, and good; it also felt like I probably should have been more worried than I was. And then I started to consider what this all meant. The quiet, and my welcoming of it. It felt like a winding-down of sorts. What did this mean for me, and for my business? In all honesty, I’d been feeling a disconnect between what I was doing much of the time and where I felt I could best be of service. After 10 years of freelance work, I’d fallen into the role of a print design generalist. This could be pretty sweet—the projects were varied and it kept things interesting—but it also left me feeling a bit rudderless, without direction. On reflection, what I wanted to be doing was a whole lot more of something else.

I’d already started refining certain processes, reading more on specific subjects, seeking out types of clients without recognizing these were forming the foundation of a new, more focussed business I was itching to build. Where this was leading was pretty simple, once I stepped back and took the time to define it: what’s important to me, where I see the most design value for any business or organization is in how they tell the world what they’re all about. Delving into the process of helping a client identify and clarify who they are and how they want to be perceived is inspiring and challenging. I love collaborating with clients to develop a strategy, and then building on that strategy to create a thoughtful, well-crafted, consistent brand identity—one that’s in line with their goals and values.

And so corbin creative is moving ahead in this direction, with purpose and passion and some excitable belly butterflies. The focus of my work will be on designing logos and developing distinct visual identity systems for clients committed to telling their story with strength and simplicity. I hope you’ll follow along this journey. I’ll track it with this blog, sharing some of the stuff I’m learning about the field, the process, clients, other designers and people who think and write about brands and brand identity design. Plus a bunch of other observations, good, bad and generally logo-design-related.

Here’s to being brand new!