As I’ve been discussing with some of you, I’m planning on making some significant business changes… starting with the name of the business itself! As of May 4, 2020, I will be officially retiring the names CitrusPhoto & Citrus Photography from use. Going forward you’ll be able to find me operating simply as the Tim Nguyen Co! Next year this hopefully become Tim Nguyen Inc and then who knows from there!
the last citrusphoto logo: retired edition
Why though? Why change up a brand that you’ve been working under and have gained recognition as for the past 12 years?
Well, the answer is a largely personal one, but I feel the business will also benefit.
I registered Citrus Photography as a trade name in 2008. I had already been using the name a little while at that point, and it had just kind of stuck. And that’s effectively how it happened, little more. And that’s not a very exciting story to tell people, nor does it carry any kind of significant weight about who I am as a person, photographer, and artist. I want to change that.
Why “Citrus” in the first place?
I’ve been asked more times than I can count what the significance of the name means, and the worst part is that there isn’t really an answer… There’s no mystery. Maybe THAT was the draw in the first place!
For the majority of my life, I have eschewed the idea of being labelled, so there was an appeal in an ambiguous word that wasn’t attached to a specific thing I was doing. To put it another way: I have worked as a freelance photographer for nearly half my life and have only about two years ago started actively referring to myself as a professional.
This comes up every time I’ve looked to do a logo refresh, or adjust my branding at all. “Why don’t we make a logo with an orange slice as the lens!,” “Why don’t we put a little leaf on the top of the letter ‘i’ !” And just none of that ever appealed to me. I picked orange because its both warm and outside the norm and AFTER that point it also became my favourite colour…
More recently I’ve read up on colour theory related to marketing, and Orange appears to encompass much of what I hold dear internally. Love and excitement of Red, Competence and Happiness of Yellow… so I’m keeping orange as my trim colour in the studio and in marketing going forward to punch up the new black and white logo.
I do really like the way the lowercase lettering of ‘citrus’ bounces across the rounded tops - called “shoulders” in the font world. I have a tendency to write my name in lower case most of the time, and liked the familiarity of the rounded letters.
So what changes?
Like I said, this is a very personal decision. One of the main struggles I’ve had in business the past few years is to send any kind of consistent branding message. To have a mission statement. A target market. A clear artistic focus. I have found this largely due to the fact that I have been viewing my work in two wholly separate buckets: Freelance and Creative. While there’s not a ton of room for overlapping corporate work with my studio creativity, I feel that having a singular message will inform all channels of my work.
The message is that I am Tim, Tim is an artist, this is Tim’s work that no one paid him to make, but rather just flowed out of his heart. Plain and simple. These are the things that I am passionate about. Also I’m a wicked freelancer. :)
How many industries do you work in?
My work is currently broken into the following categories: Performing Arts, Posters & Promotional, Headshots, Commercial Properties, Events, Weddings…with a whole host of boudoir, nude, fine art, portraiture, and an endless source of interesting things - my signature style: Lumination.
What I’m seeking to do is find a unified voice across all of this. It doesn’t have to be the same advertisements going to each industry, but I feel like coming from a very personal place.