Photography Brand Design: Christa Schiessl

Today I’m excited to reveal the new branding for Nebraska-based photographer, Christa Schiessl! I had the honor of meeting Christa last year when we both joined a new program to help us grow our businesses with Erinn Bridgman (a program I would definitely recommend). I was both surprised and deeply honored when she reached out to me to help her with her photography brand design refresh! Below I outline the details she shared about her brand, the direction given for the design work, and the final suite of elements we landed on together.

Brand Discovery

Christa describes her work as storytelling photography. A more journalistic approach, her desire is to capture the raw emotion behind her clients’ most precious memories. In her near decade-long stretch of serving the midwest, she has created such a distinct style that demonstrates incredibly powerful emotion.

Two key aspects really surfaced when Christa described the needs for her new brand. First, she wanted to incorporate lots of color in the form of jewel-tone hues. Secondly, she wanted to capture the idea of human connection. A lot of the ideas we discussed always came back to the use of wildflowers in representing her brand.

Process

When brainstorming my approach to the drafts, I aimed for the illustration to have a definitive storytelling aspect to it. Ultimately, we landed on a version of someone handing a bouquet of wildflowers to another person. I fell in love with this simple interaction and the narrative it created for her photography brand design. This seemingly mundane action creates a storyboard where we, as the viewers, can allow our imagination to fill in the gaps. It could be the sweet moment of a daughter gathering wildflowers to pass to her mother, a sister sharing a handful of flowers with her sibling, or even the romantic gesture of collecting flowers to share with a significant other.

Another piece of the illustration that I intentionally personalized for Christa was the usage of flowers native to Nebraska. Her one request was no sunflowers! Featured in the drawing are tall thimbleweeds, prairie larkspur, wine cups, and a yellow coneflower. Through much research, I chose flowers with different forms and colors that would work well with her suggested color palette.

When illustrating this piece, it was the first time I had drawn on my iPad using Procreate for a client. Eliminating the pen and paper method where I would photograph each sketch and edit on my laptop made revisions from Christa a breeze. One revision that this greatly helped with was when she requested one flower be removed and replaced with another type of flower. I also felt that I was able to preserve a lot more detail and make little tweaks here and there that greatly improved how it turned out. I definitely count this illustration as a huge success!

Final Results

Once we finalized the primary logo draft in black and white, we moved into adding full color and the rest of the brand elements. Her final branding includes a primary logo, secondary logo, an icon, tagline, and three additional illustrative elements (including the bouquet as a stand-alone feature).

I couldn’t be happier with how Christa’s photography brand design turned out! She was an amazing partner that brought so many incredible ideas to the table. I’m very grateful to have worked with her. Be sure to check out her amazing work so you can become a fan too!! You can find Christa at www.christaschiesslphotography.com, and on Instagram at @christaschiesslphotography. Definitely worth the follow!

If you’re interested in seeing more of the behind-the-scenes work, be sure to follow @victoriacodesign on Instagram. I’ll be sharing the video replay of the bouquet illustration I drew for Christa and a deeper dive into the process, too!


Sincerely, Vicky

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