So I’ve been working on a logo for my portfolio, in reality I have been trying to kill two birds with one stone because the name sake of this logo inquired about me doing his logo a few weeks ago, and I figured I would work on it so I have less to do when he gets the money together. (his wedding comes first i guess, pshhh haha jk)

My goal with this, for whatever reason really, was for a neon feel – I have other versions of this type of logo sketched up, but this one was my favorite. The neon kind of made it retro feeling, at least to me, its entirely possible I’ve done lost my mind.

First step after sketching was to get it roughed out in Illustrator – the key for me doing the lettering is knowing how to work the pen tool – there are a few good tutorials and walk throughs that show you how to use it to the best of your ability, I have never personally used them – simply because of lack of time, however I’m sure they would help me quite a bit if I just set aside time for them.

 

As you can tell I essentially just laid out where everything important is – much like my sketch. A large part of my process is printing out these, and marking them with a red or blue Micron pens and noting each mark. I also save every version, and on the print out I make sure to put the date and time of the print out so I know which order they go in, and which is the newest edit of all of them.

This next one, I place the type that I feel works best with the rest of the image – sometimes I find this typeface right away, sometimes it takes me typing out the word in like 18 different type faces and going at it with a sharpie, either way, I tend to figure that out relatively quickly.

 

The typeface I chose is called Learning Curve Pro, its an all caps typeface, but I love it a lot. You can tell with this next edit, I smoothed a lot of the lettering out, and straightened out the lines going to the N and from the H.

A funny thing that I have learned throughout my years in school is that there is a whole ton of math involved with everything I do in my art. For instance, in the following screen shot, you can see where all the points are – the distance between those points are the key to making my type look good..

 

This is like, the 5th edit – basically the results of printing this logo out 4 different times. writing what I noticed that bothered me visually, and fixing it.. As of right now I have 6 edits done, looking at hopefully having it finished by 10 edits – more than I would like, but this type is fussy for sure.

 

Ignore the ridiculous amount of things on my desktop… its messy, i know. But waaahhh.

This one up here is what I do once I get close to the end, I set up the page to print the logo at a half inch tall, one and a quarter inches tall, three inches, and six inches tall. I print it out, and if there are any problems on the tiny ones, I make note and see what I can do to help make it super legible – you never know what the logos you design will end up on. I anticipate for this one it’ll end up on business cards, water marking his photos, and possibly (hopefully tshirts..I love it when my work is on a tshirt.)

That said, this is where I’m at, I havnt had time to play around with it since last friday, I’ve been working on other type stuff, and getting ready for a photo shoot.

Have a great week yall! (also, dont hate on me cause I’m a Packer fan!)