Meet Spinning Wheel Studios

The cat is out of the bag. If you count my earliest attempts, I’ve been trying to name this thing for about three years. Everything I came up with sounded forced or cliché. I found various articles on the Internet that suggested I write down various terms related to my business and try to combine them. Doing so left me with an uninspiring hodgepodge of camel-capped buzzwords.

I wanted a name with carefully chosen ingredients. It needed to be inspired. It needed to have a meaning beyond web design. I wanted a name that was flexible enough to let me offer a range of creative services if I chose to broaden my horizons. I wanted to put a piece of myself into it.

I asked myself, “What inspires me?” I should have asked “who” instead of “what” because all I could think of was my late grandfather. He was a wise, funny old man. He was a problem solver. To this day, I believe a lot of my creative tendencies came from my many Friday nights spent with him when I was growing up. He and Mimi (my grandmother) could always tell when I was concocting some grand scheme that might involve playing with fire or taste testing everything in the fridge. They would say, “I can see those wheels just a spinning.” I think that statement would hold true for me today. In that sense, Spinning Wheel Studios represents a perpetual state of aspiring to do something bigger and better than before. It shows that thoughtfulness and passion goes into my work. And it serves as a reminder to me to always keep my grandfather’s determined spirit close to everything I do.

Spinning Wheel Studios is probably justified on it’s inspirational merit alone, but it also has a piece of me in it. You may know that I have a disability that requires me to use a wheelchair to get around. I often write about these disability-related experiences at “I hate stairs.” It may seem corny at first, but the choice to go with Spinning Wheel Studios included the idea that it is a reference to my disability. I am making a conscious effort to simply be myself. At the risk of sounding naive, my disability is a part of who I am. But that doesn’t mean I want to flaunt it around or make people feel uncomfortable. But, on the other end of the spectrum, I don’t want to hide my disability like it’s a big secret. I want to integrate my disability smoothly into my online presence. I figure if someone decides not to contact me about a project because I have a disability, then it probably isn’t someone I would have enjoyed working with anyway.

So I’ve explained why I chose the name, so now let me provide some insight into the logo/emblem.

My design style has always been clean and sleek (at least that’s what I am going for!). As I learned more and more about design, I came to appreciate minimalism in design. The idea that less is more appealed to me. Eventually, my quest for learning about design led me to the documentary film Helvetica, named after the popular Swiss typeface (if you would like to know more about the film, I wrote about it at my brother’s blog, The Learned). Helvetica introduced me to “modernism.” I became very interested in modern design and learning about it brought together a lot of loose ends I had about the purpose of various styles of design. The bottom line is that I now had a name and a back-story for the type of design that I liked. Armed with that information, I have been teaching myself about modern design on an ongoing basis as part of my regular education regimen.

So, needless to say, I looked at Helvetica as a first choice of type for the new brand. I started with the letter “S.” I honestly don’t remember where the impulse came from, but I ended up making duplicates of the letter “S” and rotating them in place. I realized at some point that it kind of resembled my wheelchair wheel. It was love at first sight.

These are the thoughts that went into the making of this new brand. It meets my requirements and has rich personal meaning.

But most importantly, the domain name was available!