Creating the Kitty Pidduck logo has been one of the most difficult aspects of launching this website – and it’s taken a long time!
That’s because, like most creative processes, it has needed to gestate – first as an idea and then in an exchange of images between me and the logo’s designer, Patrycja Kaczmarek.
Patrycja is the designer and animator of the preschool series my sister, Polly, and I are developing with KingBee Animation. Her beautiful character drawings and backgrounds attracted the attention of two channels at last July’s Children’s Media Conference and she has been a joy to work with throughout the development process.
So it made sense to ask her to create the Kitty Pidduck logo – a logo which has to convey not only my work as a children’s writer and content creator but also as an early years music educator working in preschool, outdoor and arts settings across London.
In some ways, the process was like the one I went through to create my publicity shots. First, I had to think about what I bring to my work with and for children and then I had to relate that to my writing name and to the name of the company Polly and I have set up to develop preschool content – Pidduck Productions.
I came up with four words – warmth, trust, creativity and fun.
And one image – a duck.
A pidduck sounds like a kind of duck, right? It’s not, actually, but we won’t let that get in the way of a good story 🙂
I wanted to put myself in the logo so I took a photo of me kissing a rubber duck and sent it to Patrycja.
She came back with a fairly literal copy of the photo which didn’t work at all – but that was OK. We talked and I explained that I wanted the image to be more child-like – more like the little girl in the series – me as a child, I guess.
And that’s when Patrycja sent these sketches.
I love every one of them, which led to much soul-searching and discussion with friends and colleagues and, of course, with Polly and KingBee.
We finally settled on the one on the bottom right and asked Patrycja to ink it in and to create a close-up version.
Here’s what she sent back.
We love the colours, especially the pop of pink in the image on the top right-hand side – so that’s the one we’ve chosen.
Now Patrycja just needs to add in my name and we’re ready to rumble.
Thank you, Patrycja and KingBee, for creating the Kitty Pidduck logo. We can’t wait to see the end result!
