They don’t get any cuter than this!

These photos will look a bit different from my previous posts as I used a touch of VSCO presets to help achieve the final images

So why the weird unfinished shaped heart? Well, it’s actually an ampersand. This thing –> &

When you put it on its side, it actually looks like a heart. Don’t you think?

I’ve been meaning to rebrand for over two years, but I’ve been putting it off because I was looking for something meaningful. I didn’t want my initials or an obscure logo with some funky typeface. I wanted something that was unique, something that was me, something that was something related to what I was doing (and definitely not a camera). I didn’t want to force it out, so I put it in the back of my mind and figured that when the day came, I would know exactly what I wanted. For now, I’d just use my old logo (which was still being used when I launched my website last month).

Then one day, I was in a meeting and doodling on my paper as usual. I was thinking about one of my couples and was writing their initials in different ways. I was looking for something that would look good on my package (which you’ll see soon enough). I wrote J&C and was tracing it over and over again (at this point, I should note that I generally have my paper very slanted when I write. It’s a lefty thing). I looked up for a bit to rest my eyes and went back to the paper. That’s when I noticed something. My ‘&‘ looks a lot like a heart.

I doodled a few ideas and went back to my computer after the meeting was over. I was certain I wasn’t the only person that came across this revelation so I did a quick google search for “ampersand heart” and came across Graham Smith – a Logo designer in the UK! He had saw the same thing from a book cover and he played around with it as a personal project (almost two years prior). He named it LoveAmpersand and you can read about it on his blog.

Being a logo designer, Graham was waaaaaay better than I was at trying to merge the two images, so I contacted him to see if it was available for purchase. We made a few revisions and variations to the original design and the rest is history!

Anyway, I love this design so much because it is so fitting for wedding photography. The ampersand obviously means ‘and’ which represents the bride & groom. And the heart shape represents love.

I would love to hear what you think of it. Please feel free to leave a comment at the bottom.

It doesn’t affect you visitors visiting my site and you probably did not notice anything strange. However, it did affect my search ranking with certain keywords. Essentially, the purpose of the hack is so when Google searches my site to index the content, it triggers a script which would read an additional string of pharmaceutical links for things like viagra and cialis – which google would associate with spam on my page and make it less credible. From what I’ve read online, it appears that the reason for this hack is done for the purpose of reducing the page ranks for the top 100 sites for a particular keyword. In this case, I’m considered one the top 50 photographers when searching for “Toronto Wedding Photographer” through Google. After the hack, my page ranking is somewhere in the 600s.

Since then I’ve re-installed my database and put up some blockers in hopes that it doesn’t come back. You will see some dead links and missing photos on my website as I try to re-upload all my content to how it used to be pre-hack.

If you’re browsing my website, I apologize for the missing portfolio galleries and photos missing in the blog posts. I hope to have everything up and running again by the weeks end. If you want to see something in particular, please send me an email to info@ryanchan.ca.

And because no blog post is complete without a photo, here’s one I took this weekend at Owen Sound.