For those of you who don’t know, this May marked the 2nd year of Skyler Media as a company. I have been working in web development since 2005 and writing code since 1999. Although it seems only yesterday I discovered, thanks to one, Lee Mobley, that you could save a file in notepad as an HTML page; a feat which I would later point to and say, “this is how it all started.”
Skyler Media’s first logo was one I created around 2004. It looked sorta like a sun and sorta like a flower, sorta geometric and sorta abstract. You could say it was “sorta” undefined, as was Skyler Media at this point. I knew I wanted to build hand coded web sites, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted them to be like or how they should feel.
After a few months, I was brought on as the sole developer for Pure Web Development and was forced to put my big boy shoes on and learn how to build real web sites, for real clients. It was a busy two years with many sleepless nights. Sadly, my time there ended and I thought it would be a good time to get Skyler Media up and running. For some odd reason the old logo was not cooperating and I tried my hand at redesigning it again and was completely unsuccessful.
So I borrowed some time from a friend of a friend and he came up with the idea of using a bird. The logo and the font worked really well together, so we were all very excited about the new look. Little did we know Twitter was going to take off like wild fire and consume any illustrated bird in their path. After being bombarded with questions about our affiliation with Twitter and if we “stole” their logo, I decided it was about time to work on something that would help us stand out.
A few months later I met a very talented designer on Twitter of all places. After a few meetings and client discovery, she sent over a few sketches. We mulled over them for several weeks before sending feedback. We ended up combining a few of the concepts and came up with something pretty solid with which to work. Once a mark was decided upon, we started work on the business card and letterhead designs.
All the work at this point was created in black and white so we could focus on the design. The color selection took a little while because we have five different divisions Beth had to work into the brand using different colors. Regardless the challenges, it didn’t take long before we had a completed brand package and felt it was time to release ourselves into the internets focusing on web application development.
