A Logo Is Born

We're taking a couple of days away from the store to let the painters and woodworkers get things done. So in the interim: some backstory.

One of the most difficult -- and rewarding -- aspects of creating Greenlight Bookstore for Rebecca and I has been defining our aesthetic. We know we want Greenlight to embody both the traditional and the progressive, our urban setting and our literary focus. But how does that actually play out in wood stain colors, images, shapes, and typefaces? We've discovered that we have overlapping (but definitely not identical) tastes, and it's in that overlap that the look of Greenlight is evolving.

One aspect of that we've been working on for a very long time is our logo. Early on, we talked to a couple of talented friends about logo ideas. Michael Kindness, a fab sales rep from Random House (and noted blogger at Books on the Nightstand) with a sideline in graphic design, graciously took a stab at a logo design:
It was a step in the right direction, but somehow felt... not quite right -- too smooth and modern, perhaps? Michael's hectic schedule didn't give him time to develop more ideas, but he'd started us thinking.

Another friend, Megan Barron -- bookstore afficionado and talented artist (check out her gorgeous art blogs wrack line and auk wrecks and ark larks) agreed to work on another idea: a logo with a central concrete image. Megan was incredibly patient with creating sketches as we hemmed and hawed about what the image of the store should be: a traffic light? the Fort Greene Park martyr's memorial? a tree or a plant? a dock light, like Gatsby? a Brooklyn subway light?


Heartbreakingly though, none of the versions Megan came up with seemed quite right either. Ultimately, we had to admit that "Greenlight" conjures up numerous kinds and varieties of images and associations for us, and we wanted customers to have that same imaginative privilege -- no single image in particular could capture what Greenlight means. So, while I still have some of Megan's drawings (and we're hoping to get some of her art into the store somehow), we had to start over again, looking for a logo that was text-only, but somehow more textured, to fit our idea of the store.

Luckily, Rebecca and had met Esther Smith when her book How to Make Books was published, and I'd met Esther and her husband Dikko Faust at McNally Jackson for book events. Esther and Dikko run Purgatory Pie Press, a wonderful printing studio in Tribeca.

Esther and Dikko are totally excited about Greenlight (they're actually part of our Community Lender program), and Esther offered their services should we find ourselves in need of a type-set logo. PPP's aesthetic fit ours perfectly. They use old-school wood and metal handset type (some of the sets are a century old or more) on manual printing presses -- but they use them to make funky, very contemporary designs (definitely check out their website for some samples). They offered to let Rebecca and I come to the studio and play around with some type in hopes of finding something that suited us. So, one stormy day this summer we showed up, and the fun began.


Esther and Dikko laid out an array of versions of our name, in different type faces, sizes and capitalizations. We chose some that looked promising, in various combinations, and Dikko set the type into one of their incredible old printing presses. He also mixed a thick ink for us, in a very dark green we liked -- you can see it smeared on the edge of the press, ready to be rolled onto the type.

Unlike designing on a computer, there was no click-highlight size change, or layout change, or color change -- every variation meant a new layout! Esther and Dikko's patience throughout this project was amazing -- it's a testament to their craftsmanship that they were willing to indulge (and contribute to) our ideas about which fonts and layouts really said Greenlight Bookstore. Ultimately it took a couple of visits and a lot of emails, but at last we got what we wanted:


The two typefaces we chose are from the turn of the century -- we don't know their exact names. We liked the way that these very old, traditional typefaces could be combined in a non-traditional, funky way. We liked the way the letters fit together. We like that the two words are instantly readable, but the more you look the more you notice the unique shapes of the letters and combinations (the e's, the k, the g over the t). We especially like the large lower-case g at the beginning of Greenlight -- it's a striking visual element in itself, and one we'll likely be using a lot.

Once we were happy with the logo, Esther and Dikko's frequent collaborator Lissi Erwin of the independent graphic design company Splendid Corp developed an electronic version, so we could use it on the web. Today is the first day we've added it to our blog masthead! Eventually Lissi will be helping to design our actual, e-commerce enabled website. Like Esther and Dikko, she shares our aesthetic sensibility of taking the best of tradition and thinking of it in new, funky ways.

You can see lots more pictures of the logo design process, including lots of views of Purgatory Pie Press's studio, here and here, and see lots more Greenlight photos in our Flickr set. Hope you enjoyed our aesthetic journey -- we're so happy with the way things worked out!