This was done in a couple minutes as an idea for a project. I’m going another direction now so it’s a toss away. It’s no secret I’m a fan of the 8-bit look though, and the old green LCDs bring a nostalgic tear to my eye, so don’t be surprised if I do something more with this.
Client (fictional): kik stnd
Assignment: Branding and packaging of three products
They make shoes and shoe-related accessories.
This is how I generally work on a typographic logo. I sketch out some quick ideas—directions I’d like to explore. Once I’m feeling good about a few I’ll type out the word(s) in Illustrator and see how a bunch of fonts work. I’ll usually have a page full of different fonts but here I’ve narrowed it down to just one (not necessarily my final choice).
Then I play around.
I’ll try to make my original ideas materialize but I often find myself heading in new directions (not necessarily good ones but any experimentation is helpful). Sketching is wonderful but once I have the actual type sitting there, like building blocks on my screen, I can see possibilities that I didn’t see before.
None of the ideas above are finished. The final might be something completely different.
These came from an assignment in my Corporate Identity class. Individually everyone in the class had to plan a restaurant that would be in the Rock Hill area, from the name to the “atmosphere” to even the menu. I chose a coffee shop/tea house named Bean&Leaf since at the time Winthrop was reeling from the loss of the wonderful shop Cupps.
It was a multi-part project but the most taxing component was designing 110 separate logos. Needless to say a lot of them aren’t my best work and a few are outright shit. A good many were decent logos but not for the coffee shop I’d envisioned. The ones I’ve provided don’t necessarily represent the best of the bunch, but rather a good sampling of what I came up with.
As a side-note: I clung to that ampersand for dear life. Look at the one on the first and fourth logos—rotate them a little bit counterclockwise and they are steaming coffee mugs. I didn’t use that connection literally but it was enough for me to design around using the ampersand a whole damn lot.
