I really love designing logos. Especially “New” logos for local Dunedin organisations like the Dunedin Photographic Society.
This was not a project that could be entered into lightly. Firstly they’ve been around since 1890, so there is a lot of history behind these guys & with the way photography has taken off due to digital technologies, they will most likely still be around for another 100 years.
So I engaged in a process that I know works for me & I have used it many times in the past.
All successful Graphic Design is a process – a process that has to be worked through to reach an “original outcome” one that communicates an idea that others will find favourable.
Where do you start?
Listen – I mean “Really listen” to the people you are designing for. Find out what they need. At this stage, I ask lots of questions to get a feeling of the culture and aims of the organisation or company. Remember its crucial not to impose any preconceptions on the project at this stage. Just listen & take notes. Notes are always vital to look back on to see if you are hitting the mark at the end & during the process.
Then you start with the Macro – You look at the big picture first. Which means lots of Research, so no designing yet – I examined every photographic society & camera club logo in New Zealand. Then, all the clubs I could find on the web internationally. I made a digital storyboard of all these so I could discover patterns. (Patterns that didn’t work and some that did). I was looking for visual clichés and things that had been done in the past. All of this so I didn’t design something (by accident) that looked like another camera club logo here in New Zealand.
I also researched as many graphic representations of photography that I could find. Looking at things like clipart to the icons that are used on digital displays of cameras.
Pad & Paper – Then – Hours upon hours of working up numerous hand drawn sketch ideas into (what was the beginnings of a new logo) just to see what something might look like… To quickly bring ideas into reality, adding them into the mix. Only to possibly then reject them. I found that many of these early sketch attempts just played into the hands of photo club clichés. They all used cameras or lenses, tripods…. I could go on and on, but you get the picture… another logo in this fashion was just not going to cut it.
Modern photography now encompasses many genres and there are many tools that can make images. So using traditional lenses and cameras in a logo, just didn’t cover the vast array interests and equipment that can be used to make images.
I then decided to look in other directions for inspiration.
To Work the Metaphor – To find a metaphor that implied ‘photography’, without actually saying it. It’s common knowledge that all photography uses light particles to make images & pixels are now also ubiquitous with photography. So how could I depict light & pixels in a logo?
Draw from your past experiences – I had fond memories of my early high school days in the science lab. Apart from setting fire to lab tables with bunsen burners, we also did some great experiments bouncing light beams off mirrors, through prisms & then drawing these beams on the paper beneath. Could I possibly make the typography look like these early experiments?
At this stage I had also decided make the logo an “initialism”. As every time I talked to society members they affectionately called it the “DPS”. Hey why not just use “DPS” that could work?
The Micro – Now it was time to focus on the close up stuff. To hone into designing the typography. I had some conditions to follow. I had to use the text “DPS” and use my graphic representations of “Lightbeams & Pixels”.
I can’t really explain this step of the process, because I kind of lose myself in my work here. It’s best described at as “Play”. I play with type, shape & composition, until I have 5-10 options. You zoom right in, right in to the millimeter gaps between fonts. Then you zoom out, blur your eyes and see if it can be recognised at a distance.
I print it out and pin it to my wall, I leave it up on the computer screen for a few days, always returning to make micro adjustments, just a tad to the left or maybe up or maybe it needs to be thicker or thinner. These are all the changes that make it look professional or finished.
Deadlines – Deadlines are great. “Give me a deadline and I’ll work to it”. Without a solid deadline, the design process could go on forever. Design has limits and one of those limiting factors is “Time”. I believe that if you follow a grounded design process similar to the one I have outlined above and set a deadline for yourself you will get the best professional result possible from your efforts.
I hope that gives you all an insight into how I work and possibly some tips on how to design your own logo. Its a rewarding process, because you can feel confident that you have looked at it from many angles & you know you have put a solid effort into an original outcome.
