How viola hill studio started from a doodle
Before I went full time freelance, I was working as a UX designer at a software company. While I loved learning about this new role— I had only worked as a graphic + web designer before at a creative agency so this job was new territory for me— I quickly realized it focussed heavily on analytics and not so much on creativity. I often found myself doodling and lettering and drawing all my creative ideas on little post-it notes by my computer.
Cut to a year later: I wasn’t feeling fulfilled with my job so I started Viola Hill Studio on the side, made an Instagram account, and was developing my website. It was really hard to create a professional look for my website when my client projects were limited, so I decided to develop a project of my own: Botanic Organic Skincare.
I based this brand off of this little illustration that had been sitting near my desk for a couple of months. For some reason, I never threw it out because I always felt so drawn to it. It felt like me— like the style I wanted to show off for Viola Hill Studio. The types of clients that resonated with this type of illustration were the types of clients I wanted to work with.
So I used it as inspiration. I thought of an industry that this illustration could work well in and started creating a full fledged brand from there! I knew I also wanted to include a hand-lettered logo for this brand because I could see a mixture of clean fonts with a natural lettering style feeling so professional and organic. After a couple of attempts, I found the one that worked perfectly.
After scanning these and bringing them into Adobe Illustrator, my creative Ideas just kept flowing and this brand was built in a couple of hours! This project was a perfect way to establish my style and my abilities. Because projects like these aren’t dictated by client revisions/thoughts, they are a great way to show off who you want to be as a business. Do you want to primarily work with product based businesses? Maybe you enjoy working with fitness gurus. Or maybe you’re niching yourself in the food industry. Whatever it is, you need to show off what you can do! Some things I’ve learned from this project:
You don’t need fancy tools to design something beautiful. This project was created with an old ball point pen, a post-it note, and an app called CamScanner (great for scanning images on-the-go or if you don’t have a printer.)
Mockups are a life-saver. If you don’t have the actual product to photograph, mockups are a great way to show off your vision without actually going through production/printing.
This project helped me gain some follower recognition by pinning to Pinterest. I’m not saying that every project you create will go viral on Pinterest, but whatever you do, create images for your brand that are in an ideal Pinterest size/ratio. That way, you (and your audience) can easily pin images from your project.
Creating this project helped me define my style. A huge step for attracting dream clients.
If you’re ever in a slow period with your business, or maybe you’re not feeling fulfilled at your full-time job and need to release some creative ideas, a project like this is perfect. I’d highly suggest creating a project for fun to see how you can push your creative boundaries/style!
