Designing Logos
After my experience in hell, I also had an interesting train journey back to Sheffield.
I was on the last train, setting off at 10.25pm, and due to engineering works not expected back in Sheffield until nearly 2am. I climbed on, tried to learn lines for a bit, found it impossible because I’d already spent so long staring at them that I was line-blind, tried to read some Aristophanes, found that going straight through me as well, tried to do some more of the Next Best Thing website but found that in the two hours it took for my laptop batteries to run out I did little more than get very confused over how to embed one Dreamweaver template within another.
So I was stuck, by the time we reached Leicester, with nothing to do but stare out of the darkened window. My mind wandered back to what I’d done that day… I’d had a meeting with Portcullis, had lots of stuff to do, designing all their stationery, letterheads, setting up some magazine templates. Then I remembered the scroll Trevor wanted me to put into the logo. I wondered how I would draw one in Illustrator, decided that knowing how to draw one on paper might help. I got out my notebook and covered two pages with messy, scrawly scrolls. I ripped a piece from the bottom of the page, curled it around and stood it on the table to see how it looked. Gradually, scroll by scroll, I simplified my drawings, extracting the key elements, the platonic essence of a scrolling piece of paper.
Then I started playing with other bits of design. I’ve been increasingly unhappy with the logotype I did several months ago, two uneven lines of Bodoni, not exactly reaching out to grab you. Although I couldn’t for the life of me draw out fonts (despite the fact that I used to make such elaborately-lettered tape labels, and once fancied myself as a future comics-letterer), I did the most crude imitations and worked out an idea of how different typefaces might interact.
I was running out of inspiration, I dearly wanted to stare at some piece of magazine design to get inspiration for other aspects of layout, but I had nothing suitable on me. Or did I? There was an already-read copy of the Guardian in my bag. The thought didn’t really inspire me, the Guardian is pretty uniformly (if well) designed, and although I didn’t doubt that I could learn some lessons from a close-up inspection, I know it well enough that I had a good idea what I would see, particularly in terms of typefaces. I pulled it out anyway and… inspiration! I had the Society section, which is always weighted down with page-after-page-after-hundreds-of-pages of job ads. Job ads! A massive resource of heterogeneous designs, some good, most bad, all of them different. I spent the next hour-and-a-half examining every ad in detail, looking at the lettering used, the layout, the design elements, the use of white-space (pretty rare in a job ad where every column inch of real estate is expensive), the logos (especially the logos). Whenever I saw an idea which grabbed me or struck me as new, I made a note of it or mocked it up into my own work.
By the time I reached Sheffield I had six pages of doodles and notes. And it must have paid off, because tonight I sat down at my computer, fired up Illustrator and drew a stylized scroll, straight off. Then, within only a couple of iterations, I turned this and my previous design into a logo which, although not the most radically innovative in the world, was a huge improvement on its predecessor. It seemed to me to convey the kind of establishment conservatism that I wanted, while all hanging together pretty nicely and being quite pleasant to look at, and importantly the type works with the logo (I think) instead of against it. Every time recently that I’ve produced a logo I’ve thought to myself “my first proper logo”, but this one feels like my first proper proper logo. I’m damn pleased with it. (but would still welcome all & any comments). Here it is:
