The Nightingale - a connection to personality

The Nightingale. 

What makes a good logo goes beyond aesthetics. Good designers will take the time to get inside your head, learn your values and story before they grace paper with pencil and create something so meaningful.

The idea of a new look has been bubbling away for almost 3 years. In the early stages, all I knew was that something different was coming but Covid’s big pause gave me the necessary time to reflect, learn new skills and define a future path. I’ve taken courses, been mentored, sat with thoughts and practised new skills. By no means am I a master but the path forward in storytelling is crystal clear.

To get the ideas out of my head, I had to understand and clear up a whole bunch of things, including my own story. I connected up with local designer Father Marker whose work I resonated with and unpacked my brain. We drank coffee, geeked out on art and off we went. 

Understanding myself has made a massive difference in my ability to connect with others. Along with personality profiling from Myers Briggs (shout out to the INFP’s out there), Enneagram (I’m a 4) another method of internal growth came from Persona Grata which my new partner is deep into learning about. While these profiles help to articulate who we are, it’s just information and we are all so much more than a bunch of letters or numbers with limited descriptions.

Persona Grata, in a nutshell, is a user guide to help you discover your natural gifts, talents, style, contradictions and attitudes. We are born with our personas and none are better than another. We each have a primary persona, mine is Nightingale. 

“Nightingale genius is their deep love of humanity, sensitivity, wise empathy and heart/soul beauty. Their hard-fought wisdom and gracious ability to accept all that comes their way emerged after facing and integrating ongoing pain into love. Masters of courageously embracing all vulnerability, they guide others through pain to self-love, meaning and peace”. 

Persona Grata lead me onto researching the actual Nightingale bird’s stories and many discoveries struck a chord with me. 

One of which is a legend that tells how nightingales once only lived in India. When one visited Ukraine it heard sad songs from the people. The nightingale sang its song to cheer them up. The people responded with happy songs, and since then, nightingales have visited Ukraine every spring to hear Ukrainian songs. 

Nightingale’s song is its story and stories are where my future sits. We are in this sweet spot of existence where digital technology has given us the ability to make films and capture images in such a permanent and affordable way, leaving behind something amazing for generations to come. Imagine having a film telling the story of how your grandparents got together. We now have the opportunity of doing that for our grandkids. 

I’ve drawn a bunch of parallels between Nightingales and my life and it just felt right to incorporate one into my new logo as my world of photography branches out and adds filmmaking to the mix.