Gwen Nardi
If there’s a barrier to be broken in the field of expert farriery, Gwen Nardi will be the first to challenge it. As a young woman in a male-dominated industry, she proves that muscle only goes so far.
At 21, Nardi became the youngest woman in the 40-year history of the American Farrier’s Association to achieve the designation of Certified Journeyman Farrier, the highest level of AFA certification. At 23, she received the ninth annual Rising Shoeing Star award at the 2012 International Hoof-Care Summit. And at 24, she received therapeutic endorsement from the AFA. Nardi is the youngest person, male or female, and one of only a dozen farriers nationwide to secure this level of achievement.
Gwen approached me with an idea of using her name but with some sorta relationship to the horse and the farrier industry. She was looking for something simple and bold as well as professional. After a few discussions with her and some research into the the farrier business I began playing with her name using typography. Interestingly enough I didn’t do much paper sketches, instead I just played with fonts inside of Illustrator. Using her initials GN I noticed that I could create a horses head from the letter shapes. It took a lot of searching for the exact font and even some tracing of a horse to finally come to a shape that resembled a head of a horse. Funny how things just happen when you experiment.
Once the mark was finalized I went back to finding the perfect font to match her style. I ended up placing the mark into different positions and locations with various font treatments, settling with the mark splitting her first and last name. I used this as her official logo but planned on using the mark in various situations based on the materials being developed.
“When I needed to establish my brand, Chris was my first choice. The logo he designed is brilliant in its simplicity, clever in its use of my initials, and exactly what I was looking for. I feature it everywhere—on my business cards and invoices, in the signage Chris designed for my work trailer, on logo wear and client giveaways. It’s unique, and it brings me recognition and more work than I can handle. I love it.”