I am making space for my woman-owned business.

Small business owner is not usually how I describe myself.

Community psychologist, evaluator, professor, academic, self-employed, independent consultant, sole proprietor. Combinations of these words have supplied answers to “what do you do for a living?” questions over the past twenty-some years.

But I am, also, a small business owner.

A couple of years ago I registered SMW Consulting, LLC, to do business in the state of Ohio. Prior to that, I functioned as a sole proprietorship with little more than a laptop and a social security number. Since 2019, my limited liability company has acquired a business checking account, supplier ID, a D-U-N-S® Number, EIN, contracts (important!), and subcontractors.

And now it has a logo!

The logo for SMW Consulting is shown here, with a circular shape made up of six overlapping speech bubbles — each a different hue of the rainbow — on the left, and the initials SMW stacked above the word CONSULTING to the right. Text is printed in ALL CAPS.

The design is basic, perhaps; parsimonious with a touch of whimsy. But I think the logo’s icon illustrates what I strive for with my project partners — which is to pull diverse perspectives together to share information, coordinate activities, and build each other’s capacity.

Here is the original design offered by Creative House, a designer with 99designs.

An earlier version of the logo with nine colored speech bubbles arranged in a circle is shown on a black background above. At the bottom there is series of small stars to rate the design. Two of five stars are selected.

99designs is a relatively quick and easy way to find freelance graphic artists and web designers. You can engage with this collection of experts by sponsoring a “logo contest” where you put out a call for designs. When time is up, you choose one of the many designs you like the best, and pay the winning designer for the files, color codes, copyright, etc.

Number 27 was not an early front-runner in my logo contest.

(As an aside, I found the contest process to be stressful — sort of like a Hunger Games of graphic design. Over 100 designs were sent to me from across the globe where designers were working at all hours. Everybody wanted feedback to make their designs better. Add a layer of time pressure since they were working on a three day clock. And a layer of impersonal contact because we interacted via online profiles.)

I kept returning to the design with the speech bubbles.

It reminded me of a black-and-white drawing by Chris Lysy of fresh spectrum.com that I have included in many, many slidedecks over the years. I often use it to frame the “Opening” or “Closing” of workshops when I invite engagement. For example, in the image below, it appeared as the first slide of a ten-session evaluation capacity-building series that I conducted with the Prevention Team at the Texas Alliance Against Sexual Assault in… wow… 2012.

The “Where to start?” is hyperlinked to a website that, until a few moments ago, I hadn’t looked at in about ten years: The Scale of The Universe 2.

The image is a sketch of two people looking in different directions. They each have a thought bubble appearing over their heads. The person to the left has a thought bubble containing one jigsaw puzzle piece with the letters ANS and part of the letter W. The person on the right has a thought bubble with one puzzle piece with part of a W and the letters ER.

The reason I chose this design may have been, in part, due to the personal connection I was able to form with the designer, who was honest and forthcoming. She left me lots of notes about the designs that she had created for me in the interactive chat feature. She also shared small details about her life (her dad, her kids, her other projects and/or weekend plans), so that it felt like we were international penpals.

Most importantly, she was receptive to feedback, and we began to play with the design. First, we reduced the number of speech bubbles from nine to six; and the design became more stable, less like a millipede rolling downhill.

Along the way, the design began to feel similar to some of my own talks and slidedecks. Here’s an example from 2014 where I layered different colored questions to end an invited talk at Penn State.

My Call to Action slides animated as a gif.

To further emphasize the importance of connection, we layered the bubble shapes like a Venn diagram. And… by creating a gradient of colors that blended from one color to another, the design began to carry ideas of synergy, movement, and change.

It reminded me of a set of visual definitions I created to illustrate a shift in prevention practices from mutually exclusive, education-dominant strategies to a comprehensive public health approach where equal resources are dedicated to coalition building, community mobilization, and social norms change.

A slidedeck from a two-day Leadership Summit I facilitated for the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault in 2015.

As the design evolved, I noticed that the negative space in the icon had taken the shape of an asterisk. In scientific publications and research reports, statistical significance has historically been denoted in tables and charts with an asterisk.

Right in the middle of my logo is the symbol for statistical significance!

It got me thinking about bell hooks’ (1984) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, which called on scholars to better account for the experiences of those most disadvantaged by the “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

In my current and aspirational work, I am evolving data use practices that include a power analysis in order to generate statistical significance and actionable findings that prioritize the groups that hooks described at the margins of mainstream society — Black, Indigenous, Latinx women and children, non-binary and transgender people, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQIA+ community. I intend to explore the ways that equitable data use can be another tool for building a world more free of sexual violence.

The new SMW Consulting logo provides a palette of bright colors, including the orange associated with diversity awareness, teal associated with sexual assault awareness, and the purple associated with domestic violence awareness. I have already enjoyed integrating these colors into data visualizations, invoice & proposal templates, and report designs.

A pyramid made up of six colored asterisks — purple, teal, and green on the bottom row, cherry red and yellow in the middle row, and orange sitting on top.

You can also see these colorful asterisks on the LinkedIn company page for SMW Consulting, LLC: https://www.linkedin.com/company/smw-consulting-llc-ohio.