Designing a logo can be intimidating and the process full of alternating between hope and despair. I recently designed a logo for the team of a friend I work with, and for whatever reason (perhaps mindfulness practice) I decided to try to track the process visually and note my general thinking in choosing a forward direction.
This was just one piece (albeit a major one) of a longer process. This part was just me by myself coming up with an initial proposal for discussion. I think brainstorming as a team effort produces the best results – here I took some initial direction from the team in terms of what they wanted, the look they were going for, the symbols they wanted embedded in the logo. The initial concept in the first frame reflects that opening conversation – they wanted the logo to relate to carbon, they wanted something clean (the Ansible logo was brought up as an example of a style they liked), and they wanted it to somehow depict interoperability.
The process below shows how I came up with an initial proposal from that starting point, and then we worked together back and forth to come up with the final version (which isn’t even shown here. 🙂 )
You can kind of see here, it’s a general cycle of:
- Logic/brain: what might work conceptually?
- Creativity/hand: what would that concept look like visually?
- Evaluation/eyes: does that visual relate the idea? Or does it relate something else (that we don’t want) too strongly?
- Rinse, repeat.
Anyway, here it is, an example of my process; I thought it might be interesting to look at. (Apologies for the large image, and for whatever it’s worth, Inkscape was used for this; sometimes I do pencil sketches first but I wasn’t feeling it this time.)
A logo design process: Designing a logo can be intimidating and the process full of alternating between hope a… https://t.co/Crv1fZzaSG
Very interesting read. I have never been taken on a walk through a logo design process.
A logo design process https://t.co/nqP0HiBoXe “how I came up with an initial proposal” for #fedora #redhat
A logo design process https://t.co/C1Ap8PzT5W “how I came up with an initial proposal”
A logo design process https://t.co/iTphVQcQMI <- @mairin walks through the evolution of a logo