Personal Logo

Creating a logo that was both simple and could represent me was harder than I thought. I wasn't sure if this logo was supposed to be an "advertisement" for myself, where I would try to highlight my best qualities, or just be an honest portrayal. I decided to go for honest. I wanted to come up with something that expressed that I'm a fairly shy person, who's only comfortable around the few people I'm closest to. I care about animals a lot, and I wanted that to come through in my design. I constructed a web of my personality, and created lists of what I wanted my logo to represent.

I settled on having my logo tortoise-themed. Tortoises are not terribly social creatures, are herbivorous, and (as the phrase goes) are slow and steady. I'm anything but a spontaneous person. Also, the shell is a perfect symbol for introversion. From there, I had to figure out how to simplify a tortoise into an image that's not overly complicated. I also had to figure out how I would integrate text. My drawings went from more detailed to less detailed, while still trying to keep the essence of a shell. I picked a text design that isn't too formal but also isn't too silly, but somewhere in between.

My final design incorporates a simple version of the shell, with my name overlapping it. My name continues on through a box, and goes beyond that as well. After my name leaves the confines of the box, it gets quite faint. This was supposed to represent myself fading into the background when in public, social situations. I am no longer in my shell/box, but exposed, and so I become shy. Within the shell, however, I can be bold. The shell's center is a spiral, representing a creative inner self. I chose greens and blues so the logo comes across as quiet, calming, and natural. 

One important discovery I made while creating my logo is how difficult it is for a logo to look "clean." Creating the logo in acrylic paint might have been a mistake, as I had trouble making even lines. Also, it's very difficult to simplify a complex image without losing its potency. I hope that my image invokes the idea of a shell, and not a flower or sun or something like that. I had to redo my colors quite a bit, as my name was getting lost in the box's background color. Creating something that looks unified, simple, and memorable is not an easy task, at least for me.

One thing I learned from all of the materials is that there is a difference between an image that is culturally significant and something that can be recognized anywhere. Pictograms, for instance, are decipherable in many cultures. The box in my logo might be considered a sort of pictogram, I suppose, because it would represent an interior space to many different peoples. My tortoise shell, on the other hand, is a symbol, that requires information on tortoises to understand. There are certain characteristics of tortoises that people need to learn to understand what that part of the logo represents. It's important to not pick very obscure symbols for one's logo, as it will only be comprehendable by a small percentage of people. I tried to pick a symbol that would be close to universally understood.

The videos were good examples of how something that feels like it would be so easy to design really takes a lot of work. Before a final design is decided upon, a lot of rejection and going back to the drawing board takes place. In What's in a Logo, the Navy Blue graphic designers come up with many rejected logos before the animation company is happy. What ends up being the final logo is by far the simplest version Navy Blue came up with. I think that that is a big part of a graphic designer's struggle to come up with a good design: it's hard not to go too complicated, for the fear is that a too simple design will lose the meaning of the more detailed version.  

Bottled Up: Repackaging the Brand seemed more focused on how to create a proper squeezable Marmite bottle than in designing a logo, but there was some of that as well. This video explained how the designer does not just come up with a logo on a piece of paper, but has to know how it will fit on the product as well. The logo had to match with the shape of the new Marmite bottle. It also had to convey what was new with the product (the squeezable bottle) while at the same time reminding buyers that it was still the same product they know and love. One way they did this was to put the word "Squeezy" on the front of the bottle in the same place and font as the word "Marmite" would usually be. This highlights what is new, but makes it still recognizable as Marmite. The marriage of product design and logo design was complete.