CommunityCreativityLearningThe story of The Splodges!

Splodge / noun. a large irregular spot or blot, mark or stain – especially caused by a liquid.

People have often asked us about the various ‘splodges’ that we use in all of our publicity material and on our website and social media, so we thought we’d do a little piece on the birth of the Splodges!! 

When we were designing the original logo we were throwing a few ideas around with our website designer and she came up with the lovely colour-way and ‘brush strokes’ within the little splodgers logo, but we really wanted a ‘splodge’ or splat within the logo. We just thought it would bring it to life a bit more and help it to jump off the page. 

I was drawing up ideas, literally on paper with felt tips, using her great design and various generic paint splats that i’d seen online – the kind you see attached to a lot of children’s art clubs/classes etc.

Laura (our designer) however didn’t really like them – she said they reminded her of germs!! And also she didn’t like the generic nature of them. She said if we were going to use the idea then we needed to come up with our own ‘splodge’ in a more organic way. She encouraged us to, “unleash our inner Jackson Pollock”, and start creating splodges – to really get our hands dirty and see what came out of it! 

So we went to work! With our daughter Izzi, we got out the paints and the brushes and started making marks and splats – with brushes, with our finger-prints, and throwing paint at the page – we really didn’t know what we were trying to create, we were just seeing where it would lead. 

After a while we had quite a few pages of various different paint-splats. I sent  a couple of photos over to Laura who loved the organic nature of them, and so we scanned our favourites into the computer and sent them over to her. She then chose her favourites, vectorized the images and started sending them back to us in different sizes and colours. And then it all started to take shape…..

We had our logo, we then finally settled on the right ‘splodge’ and the right colour to use as our ‘o’ in splodgers, no mean feat, and then we turned our attentions to trying to design a mascot! 

Laura started drawing designs based around some of the paint graphics that we were already using on the website, trying different cute animals etc. to see if we thought any of them would work. But we felt that it should be a ‘Splodge – that we should try and get a character out of an actual paint splodge. And then after a little backwards and forwards emailing and brainstorming our first red ‘artist’ splodge was born, as you’ll see above.

I think we settled on about 8 different splats/splodges. And from there it was just a case of developing the idea and trying different colours, turning them upside down and using the different splodges for the various characters – for parties, for seasonal holidays, for fun and for the various uses on the website. 

It’s amazing looking back  through all the old emails and WhatsApps that were exchange in the developing and making of something that looks so simple. It was a really exciting time, but also quite stressful and nerve-wracking, knowing that we would only have one chance to launch our brand and get it right.

Hopefully you’ll agree that we did. We certainly love the design.

And hopefully you’ve enjoyed the (condensed) story of the development of our Little Splodges!