Identity: Letter by letter
My grandparent's house in Lantic, France.
The connection a photograph symbolizes – to a person, a place, or a time – has always appealed to me. It was this sense of personal connection to family that ended up driving the concept behind the design of my business identity.
I am a product of a French father and an Irish mother with rich family histories; my father is the first generation born in the U.S. in 1934, while his sister, my Aunt Raymonde, was born in Lantic 10 years earlier. During one particular family visit, my Aunt Rae showed me a stack of old love letters that my grandparents had written to each other while my grandfather was working in New York City in 1923 and my grandmother was still back in Lantic, pregnant with my Aunt Rae. The letters were well preserved, bundled in a piece of brown Kraft paper and held together with masking tape. Many of the letters were written on graph paper. The script was precise and compact, with subtle, elegant flair, the sepia-colored ink blotchy and faded.
I loved that these hand-written letters represented a part of my heritage, and decided to incorporate them into my work. Together with my good friend Patrick Short, now Creative Director at Eric Mower in Charlotte, North Carolina, we pored through each word to slowly build the letters that would connect to form my name. We were successful with “Scott,” but “LeVoyer” was disjointed. Something just wasn’t right.
Around the same time, I made a trip home to Ohio to spend Christmas with my parents. Their guest room is probably like most guest rooms, filled with old family pictures that tell a story of many generations. Among the photos of the French and Irish relatives was the missing piece of the puzzle: a lunch menu written in 1941, by my grandmother’s hand, for my father’s First Communion party. There, along with the asperges à la parmesane and the gâteau frangipane was the menu item I most desired: a letter-perfect “LeVoyer.”
Première Communion menu, 18 Mai 1941
With my name now complete, the rest of the identity fell into place. The rectangular grid pattern was used on the letterhead, mailing labels and thank-you cards. Numbers from the dates atop the original love letters were used to fashion my phone number. The collection went on to win numerous awards.
So it seems that what’s old can be new again. It’s all in how you look at it.