Creating Our Brand

Our logo

Branding is an important element of establishing an identity with a community. In March of 2018, we decided we wanted to share our story and set out to create a brand that aligned with our goals. We needed to decide on the name of our brand. The name of the branded need to be recognized in our niche while broad enough to support the future.

We decided very early in the process not to include our name in the brand name. We did this for a couple of reasons. First of all, our last name is Rimel. Almost nobody pronounces the name correctly. Second, the name does not poetically flow to make a name. This decision set us on the journey to develop our brand name.

Telling Our Story

We decided early in the process we wanted to tell our story. This scope would give us lots of latitude on what we shared about our journey. This would allow us to share our travel, adventures, and discoveries. We new that we needed to provide more context to the main theme of our story.

RVer versus Nomad

While we had decided that we were going to primarily use an RV for this chapter of our story. We looked at other words to describe the scope of our story. We started to look at Nomad as being more representative of our life and of describing our story. We knew in addition to our RV would include other travel styles like road trips, cruises, and air travel. We settled on Nomad as a root word.

Name Availability

Now that we knew that we wanted to tell our story and it would be a nomad story, we started looking at the availability of names for a website, YouTube, and most of the major social media platforms. The task of finding a name was also impacted by Twitter usernames needing t to be 15 characters or less. This task took a long period of time. We would look to see if the URL was available, then check YouTube, and then check the social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. There were times we would get through the first several of the platforms to find out the name being checked was being used.

Our Nomadic Story

We finally settled on the name Our Nomadic Story. We liked the use of the word Nomadic since it means – Living the life of a nomad,; wandering. We found that it was available on all of the platforms. That afternoon, we setup all of the accounts, reserved the URL, and setup a place holder website.

Creating the logo

Creating the logo ended up taking more effort than setting on the brand name. Our first step was to define the key design elements. The first decision was we wanted a logo that worked in a circular presentation. We know that many of the platforms provide a circular format. The logo needed to have recognizable elements. We wanted a logo that could be easily placed on different items from stickers, magnets, clothing, and other items. The elements in the logo needed to have meaning.

To Go

We wanted to have a meaningful design element that reflects our nomadic intentions. We started looking at symbols from various cultures for inspiration. Then we saw the key design element with the meaning “to go”. We decided it would be the core design element. Neva likes to have subtle elements and you might not have noticed it before if you have seen our logo.

Familiar Element

We settled on the compass design as the second element. The compass is a familiar element in logos for RVers, Nomads, and other adventures. The shape also supports the desired shape. We want the symbol of the compass to communicate travel and our desire to explore all directions.

Scope of our Travel

The next element we wanted to add was something that represented the scope of our travel. We thought about adding an RV element into the image and decided against it since we could change modes of transportation in the future. With the use of the “to go” symbol, we had a natural separation. After talking through multiple options we decided we wanted to show mountains and the ocean. The bottom line is we want to travel to the mountains, to the oceans, and everywhere in between.

Our Brand Name

The final touch was to add our brand name to the logo. This was straight forward and extra elements were added to Story to balance the name out.

How was the Logo Created?

We used Fiverr to create the logo. I looked for a creator that showed a style we liked and include the deliverable we wanted. Included in our service were a 1-week turnaround, two initial designs, unlimited changes, and the source files. We paid $75 for the service. I described in detail what we wanted and provided a couple of graphics from the Internet to explain the concept such as the “to go” symbol. It took three rounds of changes to get to the final design.

Overall I was very pleased with the experience. Since I did not have access to graphics tools or knowledge in graphics design, it was a reasonable sum for the result.

Feel free to ask questions about our experience with coming up with a name and designing the logo.