Library Logo

I was asked by our school's librarian to help out with some bookmarks and as I haven't had a lot of creative work outside of my normal day to day, and the yearbook, it was fun to put my brain into another gear.

The school mascot is the Viking and all the direction I was given was "a viking reading", and so my first idea was to simply look around some cool stock photo sites and see what they had, which was not a lot... But a few of the vector ideas were cool and got my wheels spinning. I thought it might be nice to show you my thought and work process here.

So here is the original inspiration logo I had seen on iStock. A pegasus in a book... not sure how it got onto my viking search, but something about the pegasus shape reminded me of a boat and the scrolls reminded me of waves...

Before I knew it I had sketched out an idea for a logo for the library. This is not what they asked for, but I figured I could use it on the bookmarks in any case, if I liked it. You can see I was messing with the sail shape in pencil, but the inked over strongly the final shapes I did like. Then I simply snapped a picture with my phone and emailed it to myself.

Photoshop one color selection

Took my sketch into Photoshop and used color select on the blue to make a new, rough, one color image that I could take into Illustrator.

Illustrator expanded trace

In Illustrator used the Image Trace function, set to Black and White logo, to get a vector drawing I could start messing with. Of course it came out really messy, so the first step was to use the Path tool to Simplify the shape and remove a bunch of extra points that I didn't need. Then I went back and took out even more points by hand so I could start getting clean simple curves and shapes.

 

I worked on it in three sections, the book/waves, the boat itself and finally the sail. The shapes around the shields on the side of the boat and the sail both ended up changing from my sketch. And I spent a good amount of time getting the left side of the water/book area right and then simply copied and flipped it to make the book be a perfect symmetrical image.

After tweaking the boat to where I liked it, I took the circle shape from our school logo and changed the bottom text to Library. Then I added my new library stuff to the center.

Finishing touch was to add the school shield to the sail of the boat and tweak the blue color to be more of the correct color for the school (even though we do not have a set Pantone blue which would be a big help...).

Well the librarian loved the logo and we are still working on a few ideas for the bookmarks themselves, but this was a pretty fun little tangent for my brain to take.

Note: The first and third are using stock images from Shutterstock along with my new logo. The middle has a quote from my favorite book on it, get it on Audible if you love yourself.

Difficulty: Intermediate
Time to complete: 4-6 hours

Show choir 2014-2015

You might remember that I helped out with making a logo for the show choir for the high school my husband works at in both 2012 and 2013. Even just between the two there is a progression I think. Well, I was asked to help out again this year.

The shirts would be white and I went with a simple two color blue scheme of the school royal blue and a teal to help it pop. It had to be good for male and female students to wear. I submitted a few design ideas for the front for them to choose from with their slogan for this year: "Here comes treble."

The back was to have the names of the students in a frame. I had the teacher collect signatures and then took them into Illustrator to clean up and organize. The frame I drew to resemble sheet music and added a music note font over to complete the look. Personally, I had thought of trying to make it actually be the notes for our school song, but in the end decided that would be a detail no one would get and would take a lot of time to do right.

In the end it came down between two front options.
The final design chosen was the one I liked best.

I hear the shirts were a big hit too. Always happy to hear good feedback.

Kaiju Groupie

Bear with me as today's needs a little backstory...

I take melatonin before bed to help with my insomnia and general lack of ability to fall asleep. Lately I have been feeling like it has not worked so well... the bottle does say that you can develop a tolerance to it. So I have stopped taking it for two days now. The difference is easy to see, to me anyway. With melatonin I have a 10-15 min fall asleep time, without is 45-1hr asleep time.

In that extra time I lie awake playing out whole conversations for upcoming events that make me nervous or anxious, which only serves to make me more so at the time of the actual event. I try breathing meditation and counting. Most of the time there are also a few lines of a song on a loop in my head. And I also think about upcoming things farther away than next week... like Halloween.

Night one of no melatonin, I forced myself to stop playing out a scene and think of something else. I thought about crochet and my new Otachi and how cute she is. And thought about a few posts from tumblr of a neat jacket and dress design based on her design. And how cool it would be to cosplay, and how I wish I knew how to pattern and sew. Which lead to thoughts of more simple outfits for conventions.

Thinking about Otachi and the movie, Pacific Rim in general the words "Kaiju groupie" start floating around in my head. I pulled out my phone and saw there are actually quite a few shirts and things with the phrase on it for sale online. Then as I was thinking about it all this image (insert angel chorus hallelujah!) popped into my mind, almost fully formed, for a t-shirt design. Since an uppercase "G" and an "e" can look mirrored and similar and they have rounded tops and the word kaiju has so many vertical elements... my typography and logo designing brain had it all worked out.

Of course thats when I fell asleep and forgot about it.

Night Two of no melatonin, I was laying there and suddenly remembered it again. Of course I went to sleep before sketching it out, but the second remembering forced it into my awake brain and today I went and put it to paper.

sketches

I haven't sketched in a while and it was really nice to do. Got out the graph paper, to help space and size the art, and a 5B pencil. I traced the rough sketch on to tracing paper. Then I scanned it as best I could.

I then took the scan into Illustrator. Made vector art out of it with the pen tool which took forever (about 2 hours). So now I am going to send this off to Zazzle and get one printed on a navy shirt.

Watermarked for internet safety.

If you want one, I have put the design up for sale on t-shirts and stickers on Zazzle as it is free to do.
Get one by clicking here!

I super duper love it and on the navy color the eyes are nice dark slits. The little decoration at the bottom is Otachi's nostrils, but also just looks cute...

2014 Business Cards

I was out and about the other night when an old teacher of mine asked me what I was up to and mentioned that they would love to see some recent art.

Recent Art? I really do not think of myself as an artist anymore. Designer, sure. Creative crocheter? Yeah. Artist, nah.

Sure I've doodled a bit recently. And I am working on some fan art for AC:NL. But nothing frame-able. I feel lately like calling myself that would take away something from the other artists out there who continually work to improve themselves and their art.

That aside, once again I realized that I should have some personal business cards. Or at the very least carry around this custom stamp I had made with my logo and website on it... So I looked up the old art for the business cards I made up in 2010. I never had them printed and it's time for an update anyway.

The old old business card was boring and disjointed I felt. The playing card idea I still like a bit more since it at least looks cohesive on both sides. Sure, I'm not a card dealer, but I do consider the crafty things I do to be play. I am an ace (ha!) at what I do. I also like the limited color scheme of playing cards.

I updated the contact info and my name... since I've gotten married since I made these last. I tried to make it look a little like the box for cards with the patterns and dots and large symbol. I then took a few hours and reworked the playing card art to be a little more relevant and thoughtful.

I shortened my hair, colored it blue, updated my glasses shape. I also changed the outfit a bit. Before I was referencing the strange cloak-like clothes the card characters wear; now it is a layered kimono. I collect them, and love asian culture. The kimono itself has leaves (for the gardening I do) and chibi-totoros, for the obvious reason that I love them and flowers, just cause they are often on kimonos. I changed the waist sash into an obi (not too much of a stretch there). I left the lotus in my hair. I also left the bluebonnets since they are the flower of Texas. I added a wedding ring to my left hand and added a crochet hook to my array of implements in that hand. In case you can't tell those items are: a crochet hook, an art pen/marker, a pencil and a brush.

Making these cards allows me to show off my range of skills. I get to draw the design on paper, and then bring it into Illustrator to get vector lines, then into Photoshop for coloring. I also get to show off my design skills since everything is brought together in inDesign and text and embellishments are added.

So yeah, I'm thinking I will get these printed on glossy cardstock. And if it isn't too much extra, maybe I will have them die cut with rounded corners like real cards instead of the drop shadow effect. :)

UPDATE: Picture of the finished cards. I did get them die cut.

2013-2014 Show Choir Logo

So as you might remember, last year I worked up a quick logo for the Nolan Catholic HS Show Choir. Well once again I was asked to do this years. I was given a sketch to go from and the information that they would like to have all 20 kids names included.

With my old file at hand and the sketch done by one of the students in hand I set out to try to replicated it in a way that would look nice.

The front was simple enough. The shirts would have an updated Show Choir logo as well as the dates, in a normal placement on the breast. Clean and simple.

The back however was a different matter. Since it would have the names of the students it needed to be larger and incorporate the sketch that I was given.

Sketch by Student Mandi O'Neal

Step one was to take the sketch and try to recreate it in Illustrator so it could be clean and I could easily change up the colors to see what looked best. It also needed to be scaled to the larger size that the back design needed to be legible. I sent in this to make sure that even though I changed it up a bit they still liked it and felt it was close to the original intent. At this point the shirt color had not been decided as it was up to a vote.

The original thought for the student's names was to have them in the cloud of sound coming out of the phonograph, but with the text of the Show Choir logo overtop the text of the names it might have been a bit too busy. I presented a different option of using a record sleeve. At this point they had voted on a navy colored shirt and we threw out the idea of using white and gold printing.

I tried to make the design tight and self contained so that it would look nice centered on the back of a shirt. I also played with the colors of the lines and the fills. I also soon realized that black on navy is almost illegible. Those black outlines were not really cutting it. You can also see that in one, I removed the ornamental flowers since they seemed to get lost and distract the eye. I also added in a record sleeve as my idea for how to incorporate the names of the students. There was a few rounds of going back and forth on just printing in gold and white and no black, but none were really as sharp as it needed to be.

I then got the suggestion to make the navy shirt be the outlines and text, and just have the areas around filled with the gold and white printing. It took a little work, but once I started working it was clear that it was much better. I also realized that with the record sleeve in perspective that I would have to make some names smaller than others, and I did not want that to be the case, so I changed it as well.

I sent it in and we all agreed that it was done.

Final Back Design

Cant wait to see what it looks like in real life!

Logo Opinions

Logos are important. They need to say a lot visually without saying much more than the name.
That is why a good logo is priceless and why people who design them can charge quite a tidy sum if they are any good.

I'm personally not all that good at them yet, but I can tell a good one from a boring one.
Yahoo's new logo is boring.

I do love this article page where they show all kinds of ideas and rehashing of the logo idea. But the new font, from the thin straight lines and the identical nature of the two o's read "bank" or something else equally obsessed with order. Now the fact that the o's are two different sizes seems conflicting with the formality of the font itself. Sure the little tiny scoops at the top of each stroke of the letters is interesting, but it is rapidly lost as the logo is made smaller, to the point where I did not even see them on first glance at the new logo on their search page.

Obviously a lot of thought has go into their logo blueprint. The angle at which the ! is tilted, the exact size difference between the o's, etc. However whereas before I read Yahoo with that same sing song kind of phrase that they used in commercials... YaaahhoooOO000ooo! to now reading it like ya-hoo. Or to use it in a sentence: "That kid in the hoodie over there looks like a real yahoo."

I guess it is not as bad as it could be. Some of them also struck me as for different products. For example Day 2 looks like Yahoo is a feminine product or a yogurt or brand of yoga pants. Day 6 could be a toy manufacturer or something. Day 11 reads "dairy" to me.

My favorites from their list are Day 25 with the hidden smile, Day 23 where it looks like a bit of a funnel like its coming to a point, which is the goal of a search engine... to find the one thing you want, and Day 5, which just feels friendly and relaxed to me without the capitol letters.

Of course everything is subjective and as long as you have pleased the client and gotten paid, at the end of the day, the graphic designer's job is done.

Which one was your favorite?

Show Choir Logo

My husband is a teacher. I might have mentioned that. One of his co-workers asked me to clean up a logo idea they wanted to use for a t-shirt. I received this sketch:

I did a search for musical note fonts, took one into illustrator and altered the shapes a bit to get the letters. I kept the idea of the music notes as letters. I rounded off the ends of the letters to match the music notes a little better. I also took the curly-que from the bottom of the S letter to add to the C to make them look like they were from the same font. I used a different, more simple, font to keep the NCHS as a separate item visually. 

I like it. Not too busy I think. And they really liked it, so job well done! Yeah!

Concrete Results Logo Work

So, with my current position at Concrete Results, I do a lot of things. My position involves creating banners, flyers, e-blasts, e-newsletters, maintaining our Facebook pages, creating new websites, working on packaging for products, getting printing quotes, creating brands, etc. It is a challenging position that requires me to constantly be learning new ways of doing things. One of the most fun parts of my job, to me, is getting to design a new logo for something.

I have a fascination with logos. A truly great logo says everything about a company without saying anything at all. The foundation of a good logo in current trends seems to be the type you choose. I feel like the personality then can come from the colors you choose. These two things can set the tone of either fun and whimsy, strict or tight-laced, efficient, archaic, etc. Here are just a smattering of some of the logos I have worked on... You might just see a few in stores in the near future.

Jason Throws Whiskey

Did a quick logo for my fiance's friend's band, named Jason Throws Whiskey. You can find them on facebook if you look.

I manipulated a font that was already chunky in Illustrator. Added a vector hand and a border from a vector illustration of vintage train stamps.

my logo

So just fyi, and for me... but this fishy thing is my logo. It's an A and an M which are my initials but stacked so that it looks like a fish. So yeah I put it on all my stuff so I know its mine and it's a fish cause I'm a Pisces. OK.

Update: This design was originally going to look more like the artist Albrecht Durer's signature, but after turning the page sideways to draw more I realized that it kind of looked like an angelfish. I have always been a big fan of fish and aquariums so it seemed kind of natural to have my signature reflect some of my interests. The Pisces thing only helped solidify it in my mind. This logo has gone through a few changes, primarily being simplified, but of late the M has changed to an S to reflect my married name.

One Action Combat

Aside from traditional drawings and mediums, I also have extensive knowledge of many Adobe programs such as Photoshop and InDesign. As a favor for a friend I laid out a pdf and did some art to add to the information for this new role playing game he and his friends were creating. Here is the finished pdf linked from my GeoCities page:

www.geocities.com/starangelakki/1ActionCombat.pdf

All the artwork is mine, as well as the page layouts and the border art. The content is copyright to the Undead Presidents. I also designed their logo. They used to have a website, but I believe it has been removed.

UPDATE: Found a better image of the original uncolored logo.