I’ve been labouring away at the visuals for my viennahorses shop. The name viennahorses was chosen because I bought a classic orange covered penguin book called ‘The White Horses of Vienna’ which sounds all romantic and epic whilst also suggesting a subdued colour, texture and mood. Grand white buildings, impeccably trained white horses – I could visualise interesting logo imagery.

So I started off by drawing the frontage of the Hofburg in Vienna, where the white Lipizzaner horses are schooled. This ended up being not what I was looking for in the end – I just couldn’t get it to look right. So then I separated the doorway from the building and experimented with different backgrounds.

I think one of the big problems was the horse, so I decided to draw my own version rather than adapt a realistic silhouette – the logo was going to be too small to see such detail. I really like keys and so I tried to shoehorn in a key motif, which doesn’t work (I will get a key in somewhere around here!), but I decided to use my handwriting to make the main banner logo.

I am about to put it all together on my etsy shop, so the finished results will be visible soon.