This is the final, finished product.  I decided to take the quick and dirty photo-based logo and recreate it as an illustration, and add an inner glow as though there were a candle inside. The idea I'm trying to convey is that my designs are a vehicle that let the client's messages "shine" through.

When I first struck out on my own, I felt like I needed some kind of branding, quick.  I wanted to get up and running as quickly as possible, and was trying to figure out what kind of imagery to use.  I was literally sitting at my kitchen table, with my husband, being silly and calling out random objects and adding silly taglines.  Like "Wooden Rooster Designs...We'll give you something to crow about."  Yeah, like I said, silly.  Well, I kept finding myself drawn to the paper lanterns that were still hanging in our dining room from a recent family birthday party.  A few of the lantern tag lines were also fairly silly, but because it kept coming up, I started to realize I really liked the idea.  I didn't feel like I had time to really make a design from scratch, yet, so I just took a photo of one of the lanterns, isolated it, did a little cleaning, and used a word mark similar to what I use for my art photography.  I have now, finally replaced it with an illustrated version.