Day 26 - Design a Logo

Date: February 1st, 2010

There have only been a few times in my life when logo-design was a necessary skill.  Lucky for my artistically challenged self, there was generally someone else around to do it for me.  Most recently, this past August I went on an epic, several state long Kubb trip with a big ole group of friends.  We broke up into four teams to compete in the US National Tournament in Eau Claire (which I fully plan on doing again, if only because Wisconsin is replete with new adventures for me).  No multi-state, two-car, dozen-person road trip is complete without uniforms, right?  So, we decided to design team shirts for everybody.

That's one of the many times I was giddypants that Jeff and I were living together.  It made things super simple for me.  The process of designing logos included me telling Jeff I wanted shirts with logos and him getting his creative on with photoshop for a couple hours.  It was a delightfully hands-off process on my end.

However, as part of this delightful little journey I've embarked on, I wanted to flex those atrophying creative muscles.  I occasionally played around with visual art... on the express condition that no one ever see it.  My photoshop creations, in my mind, rank roughly two steps above macaroni art and a tier-and-a-half below rejected comic strip ideas by starving artists.

Since I'm trying to, at least, appear professional to the outside world, I decided to make a logo for the blog-stravaganza that is this website.  I started with a rectangle with rounded edges.  I'm willing to bet that shape has some kind of official art name.  I'm not going to pretend like I know what it is.  Then I played around with gradients to create a color distribution I liked.  I went for a green to purple gradient because, well, those are totes the best colors ever.

After that I distorted the shape by hand to make it look like a person jumping through the air.  Once I got going I tried to think about what a good way to visually capture the project would be and ended up thinking about how happy I've been this last month.  So, joy it is.  I'll make something that looks joyous.  Once the shape was figured out I messed around with the texture to add some depth - it was just a smooth green to purple shade before I did that.  Last, but not least, I placed the title across the front.

 

Voila!

Its a pretty simple design, but I'm honestly pretty proud of it.  I like the look and feel of it and I'm awfully critical of my ability to produce anything visually appealing.  That doesn't mean y'all have to like it.  You're under no obligation to tell me its pretty, just like I'm under no obligation to stay your friend.  Just saying.

In all seriousness though... I learned something really great about myself today.  After 25 years of calling myself bad at art, I spent the last month breaking out of that shell a bit.  Today was the final layer of that wall coming down.  Drawing, painting and other forms of 2d visual art were the things that I purely, completely and vehemently argued were outside of my personal range of talents.  Even if, to most, this little design is barely passable; to me its an accomplishment that I'm very proud of.  I think I'll remember today for a while - it was a little bit of a personal triumph.