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! 😉