Personal Logo Reflection
The process of designing my logo was actually surprisingly uncomplicated. I came up with about three designs. The first one was simply my initials with wings. While the eventual idea of initials did play into my logo’s final design, I knew that this idea was going to be done by a lot of people, and decided against doing a logo of my initials in that sense. My second one was a very sort of structured, angular variation of my initials, with an eye contained beneath them in a sort of angular border. It would then end with slanted, parallel rectangles, the idea behind which was the cover of an air vent shown in the opening sequence of a TV show I like. While I liked this logo, I realized that it was more about things I like, rather than me as a person. But I never really intended to do that one anyway. I just made it up during class immediately before presenting my main design, which I had intended to do from the start, but wanted to have a suitable backup ready in case it failed. My main design, which was the first one I came up with and the second one I drew actually changed surprisingly little from the initial sketches to the final product.
The idea for my logo came from a bust at the art studio I paint and draw at, and was a head consisting of flat planes, and was meant to represent an average head, for study. The idea was originally that I would have a blocky looking head, with dramatic lighting, behind which would be paintbrushes and music notes and whatnot. This, again, struck me as looking overcomplicated, and sort of generic, so I decided to change it again. Instead of paintbrushes, I would have shapes representing emotion and creativity. I did, however, use the paintbrush concept, and combined it with the style of my backup logo. This would eventually become the rectangles in the background. I also changed up the face a bit. At first, it was viewed from below, and had a giant, square brow. I didn’t like this design, mainly because it was very asymmetrical, and faces from below are something that I’ve always had trouble drawing by hand, much less drawing from basic shapes on a computer. I changed it to a simpler, more straightforward design. The idea to have a sort of sphere behind the head was the last addition I made before the final hand drawings, and the idea behind it was internal vs external identity. The eyes and general shape of the face, or rather the facial expression was meant to be kind of cold and sad, because I was just having a sort of bad day when designing it.
When choosing the colors, I found the limit on the number of colors that could be used in the same logo sort of a setback, as I had already planned what colors a lot of the elements of the logo would be. I pretty much disobeyed it when doing the hand drawing anyway, though, so, it ended up not really making a difference in the end. I had originally intended to have the external appearance of the head be the bright orange and the internal world be blue, but then I decided to swap them. This was because, mainly, I felt that the opposite was truer than the way they were currently arranged, and also a bit of a joke, as I realized that the “bad day” I had designed the face during was overly dramatic. Keeping the design but changing the colors to make the outside blue and inside orange, in my mind, is a bit of self-criticism, my acknowledgement of the fact that “teen angst” is something I do experience from time to time, but is not a part of my personality, which is what I had attempted to communicate when I was first designing it, hence being part of the “outer shell.”
After the colors and design were mostly finalized, and the drawing was ready in the computer, I sat back and took a look at my logo. It looked very blocky and somehow unfinished, as though it had been build using basic shapes in PowerPoint. I looked around at other people’s logos and realized that it had virtually no shading on it other than the dark planes and the blue gradient skin. The last thing I did was add in the values on the face, and the shadow beneath the sphere. Lastly, I added a slightly gray background to make the bright colors stand out more. I also slightly darkened the entire area of the face and put the eyes back on top so they would stand out more against the blue without looking too bright.
Overall, I feel like my finished logo communicates everything I wanted it to. The rectangles, which eventually became a combination of paintbrushes and pencils, serve to express creativity. The large, dark areas that include my initials were meant to resemble ink, and shading. The head, which has the most significance in the drawing, also has the most meaning, symbolizing that, first of all, the viewer has entered the realm of introspection as opposed to things that I like and do in a literal sense. The blues and greys describe how I act (or how I feel like I act,) and the oranges and reds are more representative of who I actually am.
