Creating a visual metaphor that not only represented myself, but also my chosen career was a struggle for me. My initial logo is a strong reflection of who I am, but not necessarily what I want to do. Since the assignment was to create a metaphor based on what we want to do in life, I decided to design my logo as a travel writer.
Prior to arriving on travel writer, I also created logos for other careers I could possibly do. I created one for a ballerina, one that ties in finding insights to my name, and one that shows my initial as the missing link in a chain. All of these either seemed too obvious, or too complex to be easily understood.
I decided on a compass for the basic design and changed one of the points to be a fountain pen head. Initially I had it pointing north with a typed “n” above it. This seemed to be a little too obvious. I eliminated the “n” and turned the compass so it was not pointing directly north.
In the different pieces of the identity system, I changed the placement of the directional arrow. On the envelope, it points to my name. On the business card it points in a direction that balances the image without being too symmetrical. On the stationary I incorporated my name into the compass so it becomes part of the logo rather than something awkwardly hanging off the side.
I decided to keep it black and white because it is simple, clean, and elegant. I considered using earth tones, however, on screen it looked childish. The use of white space is more powerful and allows the pen metaphor to be more clearly seen.
I think this new logo is a much stronger visual metaphor than my cursive initials. It is subtle, simple, and reflects a profession.
For my logo redo, there weren’t many suggestions on how to fix it. The main thing that I was told was that I had to fix the kerning on my name. When I made the exact distances the same with the ruler and guides, it actually looked worse than it did before. So I realized my kerning would look best if I did what was most visually appealing, and tried my best to space the letters out evenly by eye-balling it instead of keeping my original spacing of 0.5 between each letter. Instead of making the letters closer, I made them farther apart because this was more comfortable looking and spacious. I also made the type smaller on my envelope and business card because I was told it was too large. I also fixed my business card layout. Originally, it had an awkward zig-zag line on it. I decided to make it vertical instead of horizontal and redo the design. I think the new version overall looks a lot better than the old one.
For my logo redo, I listened to Professor Harper’s suggestions and kept the font and wordmark portion of my business card. I took the wordmark and incorporated it into my envelope and stationary. I then changed the colors a little bit and got rid of all of the borders on my original logo project. I also kept the baby-blue color (because it is my favorite) and Professor Harper liked it. My new logo project looks very similar to my resume with the color scheme and fonts.
The font that I used was Modern 20. And the colors I used were a pale blue and charcoal throughout the project.
My rationale is on the letterhead. Since it’s written in a letter form to Prof. Harper, ignore some of the pronouns used there. Enjoy!
-Tom
