An Identity of My Own: The Process

Posted: February 21st, 2010 | Author: anthony | Filed under: Logo Articles, Personal | 1 Comment »

When I have free time I like to work on personal projects. I was looking at my sites recently and noticed something was missing but I couldn’t put my finger on it. After a few days, it hit me; AceGraphic has a logo but I didn’t have one.

I needed a logo to create an image for my name and an identity. The logo could be used as a stamp in signatures, displayed on other sites of mine that don’t use the AceGraphic name etc. After realizing that there was a need for an identity for my name I set out to create one.

Sketching

Before I started to sketch I had in mind that I wanted to combine the letters of my initials “A” and “H” into one mark. Using good old fashion grid paper and a pen I began my sketches. The sketches took place over the course of three days, with pausing in between. I noticed after I came back to continue sketching I had a bunch of new ideas I never thought of.

During the process I kept in mind that both “A” and “H” both had a crossbar to work with, I centered my sketches on that aspect as the main focus.

Below you can see a picture of the nearly four pages of sketches.

Concept Development

After I sketched some ideas I began to select some potential concepts. Out of all the sketches I was only really pleased with two of them. One of concepts carries traits of being primarily an “A” while the other one is primarily and “H”

In the beginning I liked the first concept. The outline of the mark is an equilateral triangle, all sides being even. The right stem of the “A” and the extra stem to its right make up the “H”. Both letters share the crossbar and the right stem of the “A”. This concept also had a built in illusion to it. If you were to look at the outside shape you see a larger “A” with a smaller “A” inside.

The second concept has each letter sitting right on top of each other. The outline of the mark is an “H” while the “A” is the larger shape within the mark.

I was favoring the first concept but I wasn’t 100% positive yet. In the meantime I moved to the text. Both my first name and my last name contain seven letters. In most cases when working with text and multiple words, getting two words with the same letter count is rare so the best we can do as designers is align the sides.

Given that I had seven letters to work with for each name, I wanted to align each letter with the letter directly below it. For example, the “A” in Anthony would be center aligned with the “H” in Hawkins, the “N” aligned with the “A” etc. I did this but I noticed a problem.

There was too much kerning around the “I”. To fix this I changed the “I” from its modern form to a more traditional “I”. To do this I used a “T”, duplicated it, rotated it around 180 degrees and overlaid it on top of the other “T”. This gave me the “I” I was looking for and fixed my kerning problem.

The text was too sharp for my liking and I decided to round off the edges with a rounded stroke. Now that the text was done I began to use it with the logo-mark. The first concept that I favored didn’t please my eye visually. The angled side of the triangle next to the vertical edge of the text didn’t work well. On the other hand, the second concept I chose, the edges of the elements worked really well in creating an even space in-between the two elements.

I experimented with sizes and noticed when the logo was shrunk down the gaps between the shapes at the top of the logo-mark disappeared making it just an “H” to fix this I increased the gap size. This made the logo more versatile but at the same time not losing any aspects of the design. After a day or so I warmed up to the second concept and after a while I didn’t even like my first concept anymore. The concept was done.

Color Development

The logo was pretty much finished but to see what it would look like in color the only way to find out is to experiment. After some initial coloring experiments I chose not to use any color.