14th
Logo Design Process
Here’s the process I went through with some great people to come up with my company logo.
- Choose a motif that is visually connected in some way to your companies industry.
- Generate various examples within that motif.
- Select a color palette.
- Refine the result: tweak image size/placement, font size/placement, whitespace, etc.
For Goodspeed IT Consulting, the selected motif was mathematical artwork, because it expressed some of the core values of the company: namely elegance and simplicity.
In particular, the screensaver Electric Sheep was a source of inspiration. Viewing it led to research of Apophysis, the still-frame generator it uses to render the video.
The basis of both artistics paradigms is the Fractal Flame, and a search in Wikimedia Commons turned up many gorgeous images from which I generated demos for step (2) above.
Here’s one that didn’t make it past step (2):
(This image is based on an original work by Nevit.)
I like the colors, they’re vibrant, but it did’t quite have the right feel.
Another candidate was:
(This image is based on an original work by Jon Zander (Digon3))
This one had a mixed response. It almost won because people either loved it or hated it. That has a certain charm: it’s better to be loved AND hated than ignored in the middle.
There were numerous others (some are posted on my blog), but the next one was the overall favorite.
(This image is based on an original work by Nevit)
This was almost everyones favorite “fractal flame” shape. It had pleasant properties of closure as well as the ‘expected’ fractal self-similarity.
But, I wasn’t happy with the colors, so I moved on to step (3). I had to select a color pallete.
I like the grey background, but it was hard to completely permeate the fractal with another color.
I also experimented with “color rotation”: mapping the brown/white range in the original fractal to the blue/white range. The next image is another variation using the same technique, but mapping into the red spectrum this time.
This is not bad, except I don’t really like red. But this image has some advantages from a printing perspective: this image could be reduced to a single color (with variation in hue).
So I mapped all the reds to blues, and came up with this:
This one speaks to me more than the others. I went ahead with this color palette.
The last step was to refine to the font (type, size, placement) and image scale.
These iterations are less visually stimulating so I’ll skip to the end result of step (4).
I’m quite happy with this one.
It satisfies numerous design criteria. It has high contrast. Alignment is consistently applied, so pieces of the image and the text flow together nicely (thanks mom!).
Hope this helps someone :)
Send any comments or complaints to:
ben@goodspeed-it.ca
Legal:
All of these images are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, and where relevant original works and authors were attributed.
