Introducing Our Logo: Part I

The Story Behind the Symbolism

At first I was thinking something with an old-fashioned script and a rose. The letters for CATHARSIS would be small caps, since it’s an acronym, and the stem of the rose would sweep underneath it, with the flower tilting upward on the right . . . suggesting flowering, opening, unfolding, gentle forward movement. Our friends experimented in Canva and did a great job capturing my ideas.

My sweet husband said, “Hmm, it looks a little like Interview with a Vampire . . .” I had to Google it to see what he meant about the image, and he was exactly right—definitely not the association we were going for!

It was time to call in the pros. But which pros, and would we be able to afford professional logo design before we’d started receiving major donations?

I knew that David’s friend Michael Dukes was a “creative director” of some sort who knew things about branding. (Little did I know how high-level he is in that world!) He and David had just reconnected, and he’d loved hearing about the vision for CATHARSIS, so I reached out to see if he might be able to help us figure out the next step or resource for getting our logo designed.

Michael is also an extremely transliminal HSP. When he found out that that is exactly whom CATHARSIS will be serving, he became even more excited. To my great delight, he felt led to help design our logo himself!

We talked about my initial ideas, my sense that there was a rose involved, the Divine Feminine energy in the background, the desire to convey holistic healing that is both ancient and contemporary, timeless really. He said he was ‘seeing’ a rose mandala of some sort, which sounded intriguing. He also suggested that we needed to include a tag line—something different from and shorter than the CATHARSIS vision statement acronym.

We agreed that he would take some time to let it all marinate, and that there was no pressure to go in a particular direction; he really wanted to honor our vision. And, he offered to help us for free, as he believed in our mission and wanted to be part of putting something good into the world!

The very next afternoon, Michael texted me to say that he thought he had it. My first reaction was that I was afraid to open the text—I thought it was too soon, that there was no way he could have it already; I wasn’t going to like it and would have to figure out how to tell him. With a sinking feeling, I clicked on it . . . and to my astonishment, was moved to tears.

It was absolutely perfect! And very different from what I’d first been envisioning. I loved the color scheme, the “Highly Sensitive Healing” tag line felt completely aligned, and the rose mandala gave me chills. Somehow this symbol combined the energy of a stained-glass rose window (like in a cathedral), a kaleidoscope, an endless eye, a labyrinth. Michael had the sense that he was Led to it (which I’ll unpack more in a future article on synchronicity) and had experimented with over a thousand fonts until he found just the right one for us.

When David got home later and I showed him the potential logo, he also teared up. We slept on it and still loved it the next morning. When I opened up my laptop and saw it, for an instant I forgot what it was because it looked so real, like something that already exists in the world! A few days later, we had our first annual Board retreat, and they loved it too.

But, there was a hitch: Michael’s draft was basically a demo, a placeholder. It looked amazing, but to make a professional logo, you want to format it into vector art so that it is scalable at any size without becoming blurry. So he called in another fantastic human, his friend and former colleague Joshua Hernandez, who offered to do our logo as a generous free-lance project.

Joshua created an all-new rose mandala and even came up with some new ways to display it, such as a small circular format. Michael and I had lots of back-and-forth emails fine-tuning the details. Yet, the color still wasn’t looking quite as vibrant as the first version, at least on my computer monitors.

Now, I am a color person. Before I had any idea what synesthesia was, I knew that I saw letters, numbers, and music in colors that didn’t change . . . I arranged crayons in perfect rainbow order . . . as a child, I (in)famously corrected a woman at my church who was discussing her new magenta skirt with “Actually, it’s red-violet”! So I knew that we wanted to zero in on exactly the most resonant color for the CATHARSIS logo, one that can later be replicated beyond Nashville to any future CATHARSIS location, carrying the same HSP healing energy.

Joshua was kind enough to let me visit his home office and look at as many options as I wanted on his giant, specially calibrated computer monitors. He explained why choosing Pantone colors would be best, letting me thumb through his special set (think lots and lots of paint sample cards). He showed me how the original, non-vector rose mandala pixelated into slightly different colors when enlarged, which made it very vibrant but impractical for use as a versatile logo.

And, thanks to his patience, we figured it out—the answer was a both/and version! If you look carefully, you can see that the color for the word CATHARSIS is ever-so-slightly brighter than the corresponding main color on the rose mandala. This helps it “pop” even more, like a subtle accent, and since it’ll look a little different from screen to screen, I decided to err on the side of a bit more pigmentation (or whatever the digital equivalent is!).

The result looked fantastic! I was thrilled, the Board was thrilled. I wrote the first version of this post, getting ready to share our new logo with you.

But, the next morning, there was a potentially big problem. Michael had realized that with each piece of feedback, Joshua’s rose mandala had become closer and closer to the original image he’d found online as inspiration. I spoke with our Board President, Linda, and we agreed that we couldn’t proceed without finding the original artist and seeing if she would give us permission to use it.

What if she wanted a lot of money for it? Worse yet, what if she said no? We would be all the way back to square one. Having been so excited, my heart sank. This logo felt so inspired, yet we knew we needed to do the right thing . . .

*** To Be Continued ***

Tune in for Part II as our “Christmas edition” on Dec. 26!