Typography & Graphic Design Blog
We’re inspired by the work of Studio Barn, out of Istanbul. They’ve created especially beautiful branding for the Artisan Bread Makers, Mitte Brot.
The vintage inspired logotype and hand illustrated rooster, a significant symbol for time and dawn, became the backbone for the branding and different print materials.
Let’s go shopping in New York City! We visited 27 clothing retailer websites (with some help from Google Maps) and took a look at their logos. What messages are fashion retailers in the Big Apple looking to send with their logos? Let’s take a close look at 27 logotypes.
We all need a clever marketing piece from time to time to garner attention and promote our wares as graphic designers. Lot’s of great competition out there! I discovered a secret way of promoting your business though. I probably shouldn’t tell you, but I’m going to trust you in good will with this secret. And what is the secret?
I’ve posted a sampling of recent and past logo design work over at Behance. net. Take a look at the logo design portfolio and then search around the site a little. The interface and presentation are very unique. I really like their approach of creating “projects” rather than just the generic portfolio, though I did simply opt for the simple “portfolio” this time around.
I’m not sure about the efficacy of using third-party portfolio websites in regards to supporting and directing traffic back to a blog. I participated in the Behance network site for two reasons:
As with any new website tinker-tool, we have to just wait and see what happens. It didn’t take long to get signed up and get a pretty nicely-formatted portfolio up and going, so I’m pleased at that much!
I found this great post over at Under Consideration. There are a wealth of insightful comments readers have left about their own reasons for drawing and sketching.
My own contribution is as follows:
“Drawing affords the path of least resistance from the conceptual visual idea to objective visual media. It has the least possible amount of psychological and physical overhead weighing down on and in on one’s inner muse.”
Jump over to the thread and leave your own thoughts…
David Airey has posted a breakthrough logo design tutorial revealing the fastest way to get the best logo design possible. Go take a gander and then wander back here.
Since his new logo is on the internet, I have a license to use it on my new limited edition product line in recognition of his achievementness with design. I now present to you 2 products, both designed with the same loving care with which David created his stunning tour-duh-force new logo.
The logo for “BonFX” (see the top-left corner of the website!) was recently selected for the third installation of “Brands of Interest” over at Dache. All of the logos are shown in black and white which reduces them to the same elemental level of design. The logos are all presented at roughly the same size and with the same white space. The article page is very fun to scan down because of how it’s presented. Take a look at the other great work on the site.
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Someone just sent me a link to Daryl Cagles comic section on MSNBC where he discusses and shows examples about how he creates his comic strips. He shows the artwork in various stages from rough sketch to final color.
This is very similar to how logo designers work. Daryl doesn’t show aborted and half-baked ideas, but rather starts with the final concept he is going to render. This is similar to when a logo designer commits to a concept and finishes the brainstorming process. From this point, Daryl lists the following steps:
The parallels to the logo design process are as follows:
Every cartoonist has their own style and method of brainstorming and producing final art. The same also applies to a logo designer. However, with all the variation in methods, these basic steps apply in general to. They reflect the essence of the creative process and not necessarily the specific mechanics. Hey, we all dance to a different tune, right?
So visit Daryl’s article today and enjoy the work of a master cartoonist!
Learn how the creative brainstorming process works and how the logo design process flows along all the way to the final vector art. Understanding what a graphic designer does when designing a logo mark is valuable because it helps clients understand just how tactile a process it is. We’ll show you how we do it in 23 steps!
For BonFX, and any designer worth his or her salt, logo design is an iterative process. Many dead ends are encountered looking for the one right idea. But those dead ends are like pieces of marble that are chiseled away from a sculpture, as the artist “frees” the image trapped in the stone. In the case of a logo designer, the “stone” is blank white paper, and the chisel is a No. 2 pencil.
I’m going to walk you through my creative and technical process for creating the logo mark “BonFX”. I’ve run BonFX as such for over 10 years, and was Bon Communications before that. Now, BonFX has changed several times over the years, but with the advent of my new blog at www.bonfx.com, I decided a new look and feel was in store. The cobbler’s children are finally getting some shoes! My previous logo was a very simple, overly-austere type based mark relying on Akzidenz-Grotesk, one of my favorite typefaces (that I did quickly and ended up sticking with for some time). I wanted something warmer and friendlier, but I’m not a big fan of using handwriting fonts for logo marks. I decided to just brainstorm to see if I could get to “loose”, “friendly”, “fun”, buy yet convey a sense of restraint, balanced by a refined corporate sensibility. Let’s commence and see how it went!
First, let’s start with the end and then work through how I got there. Here is the final logo in production now on my website and collateral, in black and white:
Now we’ll run through 23 steps of this logo design process and see just how crazy it got. All good logo design processes follow a similar path.
The first step in creative is brainstorming is to just improvise some visual ideas guided by the research done in a previous cycle of work. In this case, since I was the client and the designer, I already had worked out my goals for aesthetics, evaluated my competition, and decided where I wanted to end up. The important thing at this stage is to generate too many ideas and leave nothing unexplored, even if it seems at odds with the research and stated objectives:
I had an initial visual I wanted to pursue, on a chunky box theme:
But no…and then I was off down rabbit trails when I realized the initial “box idea” turned out to be a “bag idea”. Even though I wasn’t going to use the idea, I still make it a point to let my pencil enjoy itself and get creative and make wasted ideas look nice. Well, they aren’t really wasted really. What’s more fun than doodling? And what’s better than coffee?
I’m really getting out there, trying to get sillier so that I can get some perspective on where I need to be. A banner? Why not? I need to “say” something fun with the logo I’m looking for…I’m drawing quickly, very small, and generating lot’s of free association ideas:
Hmmm…what is that happy lamp thing from Pixar movies? He’s fun. Can he help shine some light on my new logo?
Ok, no light from the lamp per se, but I’ve filled a sheet of paper at this point. No luck yet. It’s the end of the road for this creative burst…
So I grabbed a new sheet and went right back at it. Let’s look and see some places this next creative brainstorm took me. There is something about a blank sheet of paper that forgives the past, keeps only the good, and invites the artist to explore:
I really felt like I wanted that square idea from earlier to work. It was a feeling I was after, and I thought it was squarish, but not quite. I needed movement. Can I move some lines around inside a square? Stability and playfulness?
Nope, not working. So let’s go with the “stable” thing, keep the straight lines so we avoid looking like a 60’s psychedelic poster. Oops, I went from the 60’s music poster to the 50’s movie poster. Fine, fine…I see “staring Charlton Heston” floating somewhere…
Maybe we can stack some blocks? Have some grown up fun? Maybe not. I’m not sure about the fun idea at this point, but I’m thinking we need friendly and I’m groping again to get there. This is too disorganized but I like the freedom concept that is lurking in this one. It’s about mood at this point, and not about execution or final design. You need to trap the mood and then explore that. I’m committed to hand drawn letters for sure:
Nope, too rigid. Let’s speed the pencil up and get the left brain to take a breather. The left brain often starts saying “I know best, give me the pencil” and you start listening to it. “You want lines and grids” it says. So you start drawing lines, but lose emotion. But I don’t want boxy lines and grids! I want to break out of this entirely. Right brain takes the pencil:
That felt good! Let’s jam on this free-flowing theme and eschew all manner of lines and grids. Left brain at this point is observing, slack-jawed, and wondering where this is going, grumbling like a back-seat driver, waiting to say “I told you so!” However, I get the idea to use the structure of flowing lines to build up something more substantial and weighty:
After coloring this in, I get an ah-ha moment. I grab another sheet and rapidly sketch out some variations on the free flowing handwriting thing:
I quickly flesh out and fill in another handwriting sample:
Ah…I can see where this is going. This is not it, but is like it. Let’s get even loser and write in a manner that will produce lines expected to be further improvised on. I narrow it down to four looks and now things are getting clearer and tighter:
I now see where I want to go. We are getting friendly, stable, professional, and clean at the same time. This one is it…
Now we transition out of the brainstorming phase of the logo design process and into the production phase. The first thing we must do is blow this little tiny sketch way up and clean up and solidify the lines. The beauty of working small and then going large is that you capture a lot of gesture that is lost when making larger movements with the arm. The fingers do an amazing job on a small level. I scan the sketch in and blow it way up in Photoshop. I then blur it so I can’t see precise lines, and then fade it back to about 50% gray. I’m going to draw over this print out which is now about 5 inches across, up from about the 1 inch of the original:
Now I use more controlled flowing movements of the pencil to establish graceful defined lines. I then color the whole thing in to see what, for the first time, the final logo design is going to look like. It’s like one of those Polaroid moments, when the fuzzy film gets some clarity and you know for sure if you got the shot or not. In this case, I got what I was after:
I scan this drawing back into Photoshop and adjust levels to get my grays to nice charcoal blacks. Now it’s ready to be imported into Illustrator. I proceed to use the Pen tool to hand draw all the same lines one final time in vector. This gives us the ultimately clarity and crispness. If something in the logo design was off at this point, it’s way too late to fix it. However, minor refinements are easy and expected at this point. I balance out some spacing, tighten a few lines, etc., and Left Brain is happy to get of the bench and make itself useful. Left brains work best when you tell them what to do, not why to do it:
I’m basically done with the core artwork in Illustrator. Now I need to import the logo into Fireworks where I have my web page design mocked up and ready for production. I improvise a variation on the color scheme for the header of the site:
I export the graphics and import them in to my WordPress template using Dreamweaver and move it to the web and check it out in Firefox. This logo design is now live!
So how does the approved sketch compare to the final production ready logo design? They should be about 90% the same, where the final 10% is refinement and not fundamental design change. I think we see that clear hear. I’m pleased with how this went:
And our last step is back to our first step, and we take a closer look at the final art. What a great trip it was!
I hope this was an enjoyable read for you, and that you learned a few things about the logo design process you didn’t know before you started. Also, I hope that you understand a bit more about our creative brainstorming process and how it might apply to your logo design project.
Thanks for reading!
Working with BonFX to put together your corporate identity package is easy and enjoyable. We have a streamlined creative process that always yields results that please our clients. With 20 years of experience in the field of brand identity, BonFX knows how to help you reach your business identity goals. We figured out that there is a process to doing this, and we’d love to show you how!
Our corporate identity packages follow a set of well-trodden steps. While there is no wrong way to approach logo design, experience has taught us that there really are quantifiable steps that repeatedly produce good results. Any of these steps can be repeated, and no next step is taken until the current one is completed satisfactorily, ensuring a professional end product by means of mastery of each step along the way:
That covers the essentials steps we follow for corporate identity package creation and logo design for virtually every corporate identity client that we have served in the last umpteen years or so. If you are looking to hire a graphic designer to do identity work for you, we would like to cordially invite you to contact us about getting your project started.