Puppets in Melbourne has a brand new logo. (The previous logo discussed and shown here.)

Way back when I was discussing making changes to the PIM side of the business, I thought about changing the name/logo. The name is pretty generic, but turning it into “Shadow Puppets in Melbourne” just made the whole thing hard to say. (I’m already known for weird company names, like “Sticky Apple Legs") Changing it to something else entirely didn’t seem right either, seeing as how I’ve done a lot of branding and marketing based on that name. So I decided to keep the label and kick the logo.

Click on the image to see the logo in complete glory.

Why? Well, the logo itself was the larger part of the problem. Not wanting to advertise PIM as a ‘catch-all’ business that makes every kind of puppet under the sun, and wanting to encourage the concept of shadow puppetry, I thought the logo change was necessary. Particularly as the old one pictured Doc, my muppet-type puppet from a 2007 show.  Which subconsciously signals to the viewer that that’s something I specialise in.

So I asked my favourite graphic designer, Beatriz Vega (beavega4 AT gmail DOT com), to make a new logo for me. She did the last one, along with the logo/graphics for School of Puppetry. Out went the reference to ‘Melbourne’ (the tram) and in went the new signature character shadow puppet. And what you see to the left is what she came up with!

As always, Beatriz does fantastic work. She captures the fun of the puppet along with the overall design: notice that where the black legs/arms overlap with the purple body, there is a slight and subtle change in hue. I really love that kind of detail, and it’s why I keep going back to her for this stuff.

So for the most part I’ve updated various places where the logo is used, and this brings me to the second part of the blog post. I’m really more of a Twitter person than a Facebook person, so I find myself spending little if any time on Facebook. (Twitter feeds through to Facebook, so it updates whether I visit or not)

To that end, I am ‘closing’ my profile. FB doesn’t actually allow you to do this easily if you have fan pages, which I do. So I’m really just hiding my profile. Instead of being my friend, please go and like the fan page for Puppets in Melbourne. You’ll get the same updates, but less redundancy of profile/fan-pages.