If you’ve been on this site in the past week or so you’ve probably noticed a few changes to GLK Creative. After a ton of work and brainstorming, I decided to completely overhaul the company logo and messaging to better reflect my style, brand and personality. I became a wedding photographer because I love photographing emotion—be it happiness, sadness, excitement and love—and there is no better place to find emotion in abundance than at a wedding. That said I also wanted to bring a sense of fun and enjoyment in the wedding photography process that I felt was lacking from most of the photographers that I worked with as a guest and groomsman.

The goal was to take the drama and color that I was capturing in my rock and roll photography and translate that into wedding photography. So far, it has been a huge success. For the past four years, I’ve photographed dozens of couples that appreciate a more fun and modern approach to wedding photography, regardless of whether they are rock and rollers, med school students or lawyers.

However, my biggest obstacle was the look and feel of my site. I created GLK Creative in 2007 to serve as the legal face for my freelance journalism work and the occasional photography job I landed. I was cursed with a last name that no one could spell or pronounce, so George Koroneos Photography was out of the question, and I thought “creative” nicely encapsulated my writing and photo skills. My friend and art director, Steven McClenning did a great job on my original logo and kept it neutral to appeal to the different work I was doing. He said the the camera in the logo was necessary since the word photography wasn’t in my company name. I settled on a black backdrop and red accents because I loved the color combination and figured it looked as far removed from the frilly, white and yellow-colored photography sites that are a dime a dozen in this industry.

Then came a good problem. The wedding photography business took off, but I didn’t have time to completely switch gears. I was stuck with a logo and design that didn’t fit the exciting, rock and roll wedding photography brand that I was building, but I was more concerned with building my portfolio than making a pretty website. That is until now.

A month ago, I sat down with Allison to brainstorm what the website should look like. We still felt strongly that darker was the right direction, but I chose to switch the accents to pink, because I think it’s a little less aggressive (and isn’t pink punk). I had recently become enamored with Elvis Presley’s “Taking Care of Business” logo/motto and got a variation of it tattooed to me. I figured a similar lightening bolt design would fit perfectly with our design and reached out to the crowdsourcing design firm 99Designs to see if one of their designers could turn my zany idea into a logo.

Over the course of a week, I received 128 designs from almost 30 different designers. Many were horrendous, but one artist, Kyle, stepped up and really turned my vision into a useable logo. The logos above show the different variations we went back and forth on, from his initial concept to the final product. Below are some of the best rejects. In the coming weeks, I’m going to be tweaking the site and creating new business cards and letterheads. The URL is going to stay www.glkcreative.com for now, but I also own www.glkphotography.com (which redirects to here). The old GLK Creative name and logo will be used for corporate work and the plan is to have one umbrella homepage that leads to both, but that’s further down the line. Wedding season is  upon us, so it’s time to start concentrating on the fun part of photography again—my amazing couples. I hope you love the site and logo, and feel free to post your comments below or like us on Facebook.

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