25 maart 2017

A Logo That's So Cool It Makes All Other Logos Look Ridiculous

That title? That was part of the brief Joost sent me when he asked me to design a logo for his new website, freesewing.org. No pressure!

Now, a tiny bit of background. First there was makemypattern.com, where Joost published the patterns he drafted (for free!) in a different way: instead of downloading a pdf and adapting it to fit you, you could enter all the necessary measurements and get a pattern drafted especially for you. Pretty cool/generous, right? Apparently not cool and generous enough, because now he's putting everything out there so people can not only download existing patterns, but draft their own. And for that, he needed a Cool Logo, which is where I came in.

Now, logos are not easy. Or rather, good logos are not easy. You're trying to create something that's recognizable, simple enough to be clear when seen from a distance but still original. Joost sent me a description of what he wanted which boiled down to 'I'm thinking skulls, robots, maybe robots and skulls, and all in all it has to look really cool and intimidating (but maybe also flirty).'

So I started sketching. At first I thought about combining a skull with sewing machine parts in a way, but this was too fussy and detailed for a logo. I even went looking for inspiration in the animal kingdom, looking at weaver birds and stuff! In the end I went back to basics, and made a bunch of sketches that combined skulls with good-looking sewing tools, like scissors and seam rippers. I had drawn one skull with a mohawk where some of the hair was threaded through the eye of a needle, and one skull holding a needle between its teeth, so we decided a combination of these two could work really well. If you're still reading after this wall of text, here's what I made:


This was handcut out of black paper, like most of the things I draw, and cleaned up in Photoshop. The biggest headache was figuring out how to make the hair look good and not be a million different pieces! Everyone involved seems to be really happy with the result, so hooray! It's also proven to work really well layered over pictures from my archives:

So yes, logos are hard, but this one wasn't too bad!


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