Tamara Muro is the founder of New Orleans’ critically acclaimed Velvet Coffee. I had the privilege of designing the logo for Velvet and was delighted when she came back for design help with her new venture.
Recent family circumstances inspired her to search for an assistance dog, and she discovered this was a profoundly underserved world. She has a passion and a gift for animals, so the connections were clear. She researched the requirements and decided Soul Mates would be her next business (ad)venture.
The profile of the girl and the dog are taken nearly directly from a photo Tamara sent me of her granddaughter with one of their dogs. I spent a good deal of time massaging the details to give it warmth. I also cleaned out some of those extraneous details that look fantastic in a photo, but awful in a drawing. The “bullet” version below is for those times we’ll need a simpler, truer insignia. Their positions have also been shifted to look balanced inside a frame, and with the lettering.
The process of becoming certified and training the first dogs will be a long one, but Tamara has already begun the journey, even while she continues to grow the Velvet Coffee vision. You can watch Soul Mates become a reality by following her blog.
We still have some work to do to bring the artwork from basic logo to full business identity, but we’re taking it a small step at a time. In the meantime, if you haven’t already seen it, have a look at the Velvet logo here.
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