Four Eleven Pottery
Branding
Lindsay Marr is the talented, lovely soul behind Four Eleven Pottery, a modern ceramics studio based out of Windsor, Ontario. Lindsay is a successful full-time ceramics artist, whose beautiful work can be found both in fine art galleries and local coffee shops across the province. We met, like many pals + clients before, at London’s Punk Rock Flea Market.
Like many artists, her previous logo + website had been a DIY effort and she came to me in 2023 to give her brand the thoughtful, intentional rebrand that it deserved. The goal was to create a brand that was a more genuine representation of Lindsay and her work, but that was also appropriate when exhibiting at upscale galleries or vending at more casual art markets. It was such an honour to work on this project together and I’m really proud of where we ended up!
→ Photography: Timed Right
The direction for Four Eleven’s new branding came from two main sources of inspiration. First, we had Lindsay’s personal taste, which is a really cool + eclectic mix of Bauhaus, 80s new wave, and David Lynch movie posters. Lindsay also experiments with a lot of interesting glazing techniques in her work that result is some really beautiful and weird organic shapes, which I knew I wanted to incorporate nods to in the new brand.
We combined these two very different sources of inspo to create a brand that’s a little vintage, a little weird, and very high contrast. The super-pared down colour palette of just white + black creates a really nice moody vibe that’s very in line with her personal taste, while also creating a clean backdrop that allows her colourful, detailed pieces to shine without competition.
For the logo variants, I created two organic shapes – inspired by Lindsay’s glazes and affectionately referred to as “blobs” – that perfectly contain the primary and submark wordmarks. These little blobs can also be used as part of the overall visual system, to add interest to assets or act as frames for photos.
The new submark was designed with a very specific use in mind: it had to be stamp-able on the bottom of Lindsay’s mugs, vases, and other pieces. The stamp-specific version's tagline is a little bolder, to ensure that it can be legible once stamped into the clay.
Another submark-specific goal was to ensure that, even when the wordmark is reduced to just numbers, the proper pronunciation of the brand name is clear – a regular occurrence with the previous logo and a bit of a customer service issue, considering that Four Eleven mugs are often given as gifts to folks who would struggle to track down the maker. I simply staggered the numbers, so that even newcomers to Lindsay’s work were able to correctly decipher the brand’s correct pronounciation & name.