I had lofty goals of creating a new ‘brand’ for myself for 2011. I didn’t manage to get it completed before the first of this year, but I’ve been steadily working on logos and business cards and website graphics and what not for the past month and a half. Convienently, we’ve had to work on logos and business cards in my LCC Technical Communication Practices class. Since I’ve been working EVER so hard, I wanted to put together a lengthy process post on showcasing all of my hard work on my logo!
So, let’s start at the beginning. I’ve never really had much of a “real” logo or logotype. My most recent edition of some sort of graphic like that would be the banner I use on my portfolio website. I wanted to create a better logo for myself for 2011 to make my web presence and personal brand more consistent (as well as new business cards, because I seriously need some).
I quickly sketched this idea with a Sharpie on a Post-It sometime in the summer and had never really developed it. With the recent assignment in my LCC class to create a logo inspired by our initials and typography, I got to work! First I made letters out of rectangles and squares in Illustrator with my own proportions. After some feedback, I tried to create a slightly softer ‘double E’ image by rounding all the corners.
process from L-R: original, tilted, added negative space to show E's more clearly, and 'rounded' less harsh version
A logo that can be made into a pattern is an important feature that I’m looking for, so I made sure to experiment with that as well as different orientations.
orientation and pattern tests of 'rounded' double-E
After some additional feedback, my audience seemed displeased that I used simple rectangles instead of actual letters from a typeface, so I found a list of ‘Internet Browser’ friendly typefaces (using this as a guide to achieve typography consistency between The Internetz and whatever print documents I create) and used capital E’s to create more iterations of the same double-E/H idea.
[This chart is from here]
(listed in alphabetical order from the chart above)
I chose what I thought was the most interesting shape from the list, the image created with Courier, and played with it some more. One of my favorite personal trends is to take a simple shape and rotate around in a circle to create an intricate pattern (much like the star/circle thing BP uses). I did this with an icon created with Courier and Century Schoolbook.
After many renditions of what I called ‘quilt stars’, I decided I wanted something a little less intricate and easily scalable for a pattern (among other applications). I liked that I could abstract the ‘quilt star’ and get beautiful layers of color if I blew the shape up and then cropped a random business-card sized rectangle from it, but this didn’t really accomplish everything I wanted – it didn’t give me a clear direction for easy application to various mediums, or represent me as a designer or person very well (bawww). A friend of mine helped direct me; I took a large, Arial capital E and created a simpler ‘star’ image from it, which was much easier to scale down into a dot pattern.
3 Arial 'E' stars, each with different layer settings (the middle one was chosen as the final)
dot pattern
You can see this dot pattern put to good use on my flavors.me page and on my twitter. I even got my flavors.me page listed in the ‘featured’ portion of the directory because they liked it so much! I think that both my flavors.me and twitter are quite bright, but I think its a good change and most likely a true representation of who I am as a person AND designer. I’ve been doing insane amounts of work to get this icon + dot pattern incorporated into a beautiful and seamless business card design, so I’ll save THAT process for a whole new process post! I already briefly talked about business cards here (this is that ‘watermark’ I was referring to).
♥eth
Thanks for making it to the end! 
the dk
Sun, Feb 13, 2011
Hi Emma,
What a nice little journey. I tried my hand at creating the logo for our new company earlier this year too. I am by no means a designer (however my newly created alter-ego may purport to be) but with video tutorial after video tutorial and many hours learning a bit of Photoshop, I finally came up with something my wife and I could agree on.
I do like your experimenting and seeing into your thoughts and processes for what you finally came up with. I have an incredible amount of respect for what you designer types accomplish, and, what I think is even more impressive, create. For when people see a creation, be it a design, wallpaper, business card, logo, and it “makes sense” it all seems so easy. It is all too easy to forget that many hours of thought, coupled with months, years, lifetimes of training, fiddling and experimenting actually went into it.
I wish you well and look forward to seeing more, and perhaps learning more, of the creative side of the world!
Best regards,
Dustin
Emma Thea
Sun, Feb 13, 2011
Dustin
Thanks for taking the time to comment! I think that creating logos is challenging, but even more so when you’re designing for yourself. I personally use Adobe Illustrator instead of Photoshop to do a lot of my graphic design; I think it’s faster and easier to use. I’m glad someone enjoyed reading about my process! As you mentioned, a ton of work does go into the final design and I just wanted to do a decent job of documenting all the steps I go through.
There will definitely be more posts like this as I continue to work on my business cards.
Thanks again!
Emma
the dk
Fri, Feb 18, 2011
Hi Emma,
I suppose now I will have to dedicate a bit more time to learning Ai…
I hope that time will present itself soon.
Right now I am working on our websites and saturating myself with everything new I have to read. I go to a forum for a simple problem and it opens up a veritable can of worms as I go from that forum to a blog to read about something the first forum mentioned, and then to another help page to find out about something the blog mentioned….sometimes I feel I should just put down the shovel.
I guess, however, I am a glutton for information and punishment at times.
Keep’em coming!
Regards,
Dustin
derrick
Thu, Feb 17, 2011
i love it