So I was asked to do a logo with the following specs:
- Theme of Connection
- Letters S and B, in that order.
- Clean
So informative, right? Now here is where I and you should ask all sorts of other questions like: Who is your audience? What does the S and B stand for? What kind of Connection, human, electrical, mechanical? And anything else that pops into your head. And based on these answers maybe even question them further. The more understanding you have about your client the better and sometimes its not as easy as looking them up on the Internet. In this specific situation I was contracted through another company who dealt primarily with small local businesses. So I thought this must be a logo for them. So I forgot one of the first rules of design which is, "Do your research!" And now I will briefly and possibly unwillingly drag you down the path of what I actually did.
First idea:
Legos!
I decided to go with a Lego inspired typeface, which definitely, at least in my head, addressed the theme of Connection and was surprisingly versatile in creating letters.
However I noticed 3 things almost immediately. It was definitely not clean. It as pretty hard to read and when I tried to do the two letters I had to incorporate it looked downright ugly.
This didn't however discourage me from the Lego theme. Maybe it is my love for the tiny imagination building toys or pure stubbornness but I continued with the Lego theme just at a 3/4 view.
So you might be thinking, "Yeesh! Really this guy designs stuff professionally?" And honestly looking back at this, I too am kind of wondering, 'what made me believe this could work?' But let me get on my high horse and say, design is an iterative process and so is creativity. Every idea or sketch can foster another idea or thought and if we don't 'put down' the crappy ones, the good ones, right behind them, may never come up. So back to the path I'm dragging you on. This one was okay, still connected, slightly more legible but again, clean, it was not. So with a little tweaking the next more amazing iteration was born!
Yeah, yeah, I know not much different, but if you've read this far, it got you to continue reading, right? Hello...? Anyway, with a little contrast in colors and the extrication of those now really annoying Lego bumps, we have a decent looking logo. I might have submitted this too had I not had a bit of an epiphany. I thought to myself, 'Self, it looks a little unbalanced as if the S will just fall right out,' and that was probably true. Without the Lego bumps holding everything together the piece would not work physically. Not to say that every Logo needs to respect the laws of physics but in this case I had a feeling it did. So this 'feeling' took me back to the sketchpad and I wound up changing the colors a bit, getting rid of the internal border and adding an offset external surrounding stroke and rotating the S, 90 degrees. With the following result:
Ta Dah! I liked it and I feel like I would have never come to this result without the trials and errors of the previous ones. I also felt like it addressed all the specs given to me by the client and I slapped a background on it and sent it off.
Turned out they went with another one of my ideas and not this one but hey, "thems is the breaks."
Thanks for reading!
