Ray Family Crest
In my graphic design class, the class was assigned to create a family crest. We could design it however we wanted, as long as the design represented some parts of our family. When I began drawing some thumbnail sketches, I tried to draw anything that related to my family, from the TV shows and movies that we all love to the careers my parents are in to the hobbies my siblings do. In the end, I decided to design a crest that represented the nerdy side of my family. The process that I went through to create this crest had some ideas that failed and others that went into the best design that I could produce.
These are some preliminary designs and the ten thumbnail sketches that I created.
These are the four rough sketches that I made leading up to actually going into Illustrator and making it. In the end, I decided to design something that looked like the crest in the top left.
The link below leads to a collection of posts that provided some inspiration to my crest.
https://www.behance.net/collection/147328319/Family-Crest
When I began the sketching process, I wanted to make a shield with some shapes inside of it, drawing inspiration from the shield designs found in my inspiration collection. While creating the thumbnail sketches, however, I didn't know what I wanted to focus on, so I just drew anything that related to my family, from the instruments they might have played to the jobs they have to the colleges they graduated from. In the end, I decided to focus on the nerdy side of my family, drawing inspiration from sci-fi movies and TV shows like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who. I also wanted to add in some representation of what my family looked like, so I added in three pairs of glasses and three eyes since three of my family members have glasses and the other three don't.
This is my Illustrator page. It shows my entire design process, from how I created the shield to the other two crests I was considering to use.
I started with the design of the shield. At first, I pulled a picture of a shield from the Internet and tried to copy that, but that proved to limit how much I could fit in my crest, so I designed my own shield. Next, I started designing a TIE fighter. I did my best to copy the outline of the ship, but as I did this, I didn't like how it looked, so I decided to simply skip it all together and move on to the USS Enterprise. I ended up liking the design of the ship and kept it. Next up was the TARDIS, which, at first, proved to be somewhat challenging to design. I needed to keep it simple, yet I also needed to make it look like an actual TARDIS. In the end, I accomplished this an added it in. Finally, I created the glasses and the eyes. The glasses only consisted of two circles and a line, but the eyes were a different story. I figured that drawing the outline of the eye would suffice, but it did not. Because of this, I added the iris and the pupil and added that into the final design.
These are my final designs, one in color and the other in black and white.
This is my final crest design. The Enterprise inside the TARDIS shows off two of the sci-fi TV shows that my family adores. I made the Enterprise orange so it could pop out on the blue TARDIS. On the sides are the three pairs of glasses and the three eyes. Their shade of blue represent the blue eyes everyone in my family has. At the bottom of the shield is "Ray". The text is pink because at some point, my siblings and I loved the color pink. The font I chose can look "old" to some people, yet in some ways, it looks somewhat modern, representing how my family has been around for awhile. I placed all of these elements on a yellow background to have the shapes pop out and to relate it to the sun and how it shoots out rays of sunlight.
