Logo Design development - Chicago Sausage House

I've recently been working on some logo concepts for a practice brief. The brief was to create a logo for the Chicago Sausage House, the establishment is a bar and bistro that specialises in making handmade sausages and craft ales. The logo needs t be fun, friendly, hand crafted and well designed, also with a bespoke and script feel to it.

Now as it's a practice brief it means that the establishment doesn't exist, but it's good to work on briefs like this to work on your skills. I found the brief on a website called briefbox, which has a wide variety of practice briefs available for anyone to participate in.

The idea for the logo was to make it stand out but also keeping it simple and not too over bearing. I started of by incorporating some hand written text along with the sausage and the chicago skyline.

I chose the final designs below as I feel that these design would translate well over a range of marketing materials.

Design Process: How I Design a Logo

A logo is considered to be the most important part of your businesses identity, it the first aspect of your business that the customer sees and it's the one thing that people will think of when it comes to your business.

Designing a logo can be a bit of long process and doesn't happen over night. The length of time depends on the amount of concepts the client wishes to see and the amount of revisions that need to be done (and also the amount of work/projects that the designer is currently working on).

So what goes into designing a logo? well firstly there's research, before I can start designing a logo I need to know everything about your business from what you do, your products, who you want to attract with the logo (i.e a certain age demographic), what you want the logo to say about you, even down to colours and fonts. Once I have all this information I can move onto the next stage.

Thumbnail concepts, these are quick little ideas that I sketch down either in a sketchbook or in Illustrator. In this stage I may sketch out as many as 20 ideas and from the thumbnails I then chose the concepts that I feel work the best, this may be as little as 4 or as much as 8 concepts. I then send these over to the client to look through and chose the ones that they like the most.

Once the client has come back to me on which logo they would prefer I then start the revisions. The revision stage is different in each project, for example some clients can't decide on a logo and would rather a mix of a couple of different concept put together or they will decide on a concept and will be happy with that. Normally though the revision stage involves changing the font size or style, tweaking the colours or changing up the colours altogether and altering the size of the design.

Also during the revision stage I will make sure that logo will work in black and white. This is usually because in some instances your colour choice may not work on a certain background colour, for example a white logo works better on a black background over a navy blue logo.

There is a of back and forth with the client during this stage to make sure that logo meets their expectations.

Once the final logo has been decided the next stage is to export the logo out into the file formats that the client require (usually .jpg, .png, .pdf etc).

*just to note that this is the process that I use to design a logo, other designers may use a different process. the images in this blog post are a show a selection of work from a university project.

Graphic Design - Glossary #1

I thought I would put together a quick glossary of some of the terms and words I tend to use when talking to a client about their designs or artwork.

Colour settings:

CMYK
stands for Cyan Magenta Yellow Key (black) also known as process colour / four colour process this is the standard colour preset for any document going to print.

RGB
stands for Red Green Blue, this is the standard colour preset for any screen.

Hue
one of the 3 primary attribute to colour, this a variety of colour such as red, yellow, blue or green.

Saturation
this is the intensity of hue,

HSB
Hue, Saturation and Brightness

HLS
Hue, Lightness and Saturation

Grayscale
refers to the image being in black and white

Gradient
A function in most design software that allows you to fill a space with a smooth transition of colours.

Opacity
The range of colour or tonal value, make a colour or image opaque (100%) or transparent (0%)

PPI 
Pixels per inch, how the resolution of a computer screen in maesured.

Vector Graphic
these are graphics that have been drawn in a software such as Adobe Illustrator and allows the designer to change the size of the vector without any loss in quality.

Print:

DPI
Dots per Inch, this measures the sharpness of an image standard resolution for a printed document is 300 dpi and for a screen it is 72 dpi

Pixalated
term used when an image is too blurry and the pixels can be seen

Bleed
All documents that are sent to print should include a bleed, this allows the design/ image / colour to go all the way to the edge.  normal bleed is about 5mm

Header
the text that appears at the top of the page

Headline
Large text that illustrates the opening statement, used in layouts

Body Text
this is the main bulk of the text that is included within a design/layout

Alignment
this is the adjustment of any text or images on the page, i.e left, right, centred

Double Page Spread
Design of a layout that goes across 2 pages.

Dummy
A mock up of the final design

Type:

Typeface
a typeface consists of a series of fonts and a full range of characters, letters, punctuation and marks.

Font
A complete combination of characters that has been created in a specific style, size and type.

Typography
the name given to the art of arranging type so that is aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Sans Serif
A style of typeface that doesn't have 'feet' i.e Helvetica, Arial

Serif
Refers to a typeface that has 'feet' i.e Times New Roman,

Lowercase
refers to a smaller form or non-capitol letter

Uppercase
Capitol letter

Italic
the style of letters that slant to the right and is often used to emphasis a piece of text

Oblique
A roman typeface that often slants to the right, not to be confused with italics.

Pica
Measurement in which type is measured, normally used for typewriters.

Kerning
The space between individual letters in a word

Leading
This is the space between each sentence in a paragraph

Rivers
refers to the white gaps that appear between the words that have been justified on a page.


File Formats:

.jpeg (jpg) (Joint photographic element group)
standard image file

.pdf (Portable Document Format)
this format is opened within adobe acrobat and can contain several pages.

.png  (Portable network graphics)
this file format is normally used for web images, it displays images without a jagged edge.

.tiff (Tagged image file format)
commonly used on files with a high colour depths

.ai
 Illustrator file

.indd
Indesign File

.psd
Photoshop file

.gif (Graphics interchange format)
displays 256 colours for each frame of an animation

Zip files (Zone information protocol)
this a method of compressing larger files so that they can be transferred or stored easier

Bored? Draw a stickman!

Draw a stickman is a website where you can have fun drawing stickmen! no seriously...

you start of by selecting an episode and then you draw your stickman. As the episode plays you are prompted to draw a variety of other items such as balloons and a sword so that your stickman can progress through the story.

It's a bit of fun if you need to waste a bit of time.

Visit Draw a stickman here!

Scribbler Too

This is a fun little website if you are looking for a fun way to kill some time. The website adds a cobweb like effect to any drawing that you do.

visit scribblertoo here!

Inspiration # 13 - Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold was a typographer, book designer, teacher and writer. He is known for creating the Sabon, Zeus, Saskia and Transit typefaces and for his iconic design for penguin books. Just like all other examples of  modernist design the work of Tschichold is simplistic and follows a simple grid system which gives his work a sense of uniformity and symmetry.

 

Llama Font!?

This post is purely for a bit of fun

I found a website whilst looking for some typefaces and I cam across Llama font, yes you heard me right Llama font. On the website you just type in anything you want into the box and it will appear below in the llama font.

visit the website here!

Inspiration # 12 - Max Huber

Max Huber is another Swiss designer who's work I really love, though his work is unlike the other Swiss Designers that I like. Huber's work is very colourful and vibrant in comparison to the work of Josef Muller Brockman, Emil Ruder or Jan Tschichold.

Inspiration # 11 - Adolphe Mouron Cassandre

I was introduce to the work of Adolphe Mouron Cassandre back when I was in school, I found his work in an art deco book and instantly loved his work. His work is very much simplistic but bold and colourful enough that it catches your eye, his work also consists of geometric shapes that help with the simplicity of the design and is a prime example of the style of work that was produced during the art deco period. I also find some aspects of his work resembles the style of  swiss graphic design. 

Inspiration # 10 - Emil Ruder

Emil Ruder's work is very typical of Swiss graphic design, just like all the other notable Swiss Graphic Designers and Typographers his work is very simplistic with a use of clean typography (this is the main design element when it comes to Swiss Graphic Design). Just like the work of Joseph Muller Brockman you can see that Ruder's work follows a grid system and although the following posters are pretty much imagery based a lot of Ruder's work is primarily typography based.

inspiration # 9 - Josef Muller Brockman

I know its a bit cliché but I do really love the work of Joseph Muller Brockman, every piece of work he design was created using a grid structure, in turn everything has it's own place on the page and nothing seems to be squeezed or over designed. He is best known for his simplistic designs and his use of clean typography. His work was one of my many inspirations throughout uni and it still remains my top source of inspiration.