designerdlog

cary's mark, an explanation

the following is an explanation i wrote as a comment response but felt that i should just post it by itself too so that more people may see and read it, if said persons are the least bit interested. so without futher adeiu...

ok sara, here you go, i will give my thoughts and explanation on this mark:

The difficulty in doing any photographer's mark, i think, is making him/her standout from other photograhers, and coming up with something creative that represents them without using a camera or some other generic photography icon. I guess this dilema is probably pretty similar to all marks.

So what i was trying to do for cary was to represent the organic nature of his photography (organic as in the way he approaches a shot not the subject he shoots) and represent photography itself. So i decided i wanted to explore the different ideas of light and capturing light (photography). The difficulty in this was showing it in some sort of iconic way that lots of people will grasp quickly. Somewhere along the line i began playing with an eyeball, but not in the cross-section type view you see now, but more in a cartoon character sort of iconic kind of eye. And i am not sure when i made the realization but it was definitely one of those "AHA!" moments when i thought about light coming through a lens and being projected onto film and light coming thought the eye.

I felt that a cross-section diagram of an eye was probably something readily recognizable by the general public from all the time you studied it in school and i felt like abstracting it more would easily take it out of that science diagram sort of thing and into the artistic realm and towards a more general representation of a lens and light (photography). There had also been a good deal of talk between cary and i about how we would really be marketing his photography mainly as "his photography" and not toward much of anything specific but really just on the merits of the way he sees and composes so what better to allude to in the mark than an eyeball (and this really goes for all photographers).

So the finished mark became a combination eyeball and lens/camera setup. The reason the "light" is in a wierd shape and not connected to the "film" is simply to make it more abstract and not so literally a diagram, and also because the shapes are much more pleasing that way. The "film" is there bring the camera and something mechanical to the "eye", otherwise it would be just that an "eye". The symmetry in the light was kept to ensure that it was still recognizable as light, and the small indention in the left side is there to show that there is a focus point where the light is inverted. it also just so happens that it makes a "c", not something i planned per say, but something that works well as a secondary progression.

hope this gives an good explanation of it for you, it was kinda fun to write it and think through it again myself.