Making Logos and Recognising Good Logo Design - 23.09.22
In this workshop, we learnt how to make our logos using Illustrator's tools. But before we had a go at making our own logos, we tried to recognise some good logo designs from different companies and how they tell what the company does. Some of the logos demonstrated in class is shown below with some of my own thoughts about the logos and what they represent.
Formula 1 Logo
This is the Formula 1 Logo. As you can (well, technically cannot due to being just space there) see, the negative space between the F and the Speed lines creates a 1, which the brain fills out and enables us to see the one, even though it is not there.
The colour red also symbolises danger, as red is a common colour to use when danger is around. There is also the use of speed lines and italics to portray the speeds of a formula 1 car.
This is the amazon logo. As the logo had A and Z in the name and Amazon tried to have everything stocked up as their business, the most effective way of showing this was to use an arrow pointing from the A to the Z.
It also portrays someone smiling (in my opinion) and how happy they are when they get their stuff on next-day delivery.
Amazon Logo
Amazon Logo
This logo consists of having one letter (either a letter u or a n) which is used to create the logo to say the company name Sun. This also creates a square shape that resembles something like a microchip, which could be the company's main source of buisness.
My Own Logo Design
I took to paper to design my own logo first. This is so that I could expand on ideas a lot quicker than just straight up using illustrator and limiting myself to my abilities using that software. I know bits for that software, but I am not fully confident in it. The sketches are shown below. My idea was to come up with the letters I and D, without it looking like it is something related to ID (like photo ID).
The first idea was good, it showed the letters with I and D really well, but it felt like a logo for a corporation and felt too strict/business-like. I wanted something that represents both my graphics side and my photography side. I looked everywhere for a good logo idea until I had a look at what the sensor placement logo is, which is shown in the 4th photo. The original logo was for the placement of the sensor/film would be. The photo shows it off on a camera and shows what the symbol looks like. This would become my own logo design, which is shown in the second photo.
The next step of the process was to create this in illustrator. The steps are shown below; I had trouble trying to get a nice curve on the letter D but managed to make it by using the pen tool and doing it by hand, instead of splicing and stitching the paths together.
I know that there might be a faster way of making sure that the letter D was made faster, but at the time, this was the easier way to make this type of letter and logo.
I also experimented with the use of different shades of grey, as it was very difficult to make out the lettering on the logo and also experimented with elongating and splitting the letter I.
For next week's lesson, we are going to try and make these logos onto something that is reproducible and can be used as a print stamp.
