feather2pixels

Did I mention Erin is starting a kid opera company?

By company I of course mean a struggling non-profit, and by starting I of course mean spending every weekday in a foul mood over municipal tax codes or something.

When she decided Little Opera needed a logo, I referred her to a few colleagues.  When she decided she needed a free logo, I referred her to myself.   Anyway I thought it would be fun to document the process, since I’ve never made a logo.

The idea was to build something around the image of a feather, which holds some kind of significance in opera that I forget.   We found some beautiful gull feathers at Ocean Beach but they ended up being too detailed to make a good logo:

This failure made me realize how conspicuous a good logo really is, the perfect example one of those things that everyone else already knows about the world but I learn the hard way.  (However I will add that this was much easier than the way I learned how to correctly pronounce the word spatula, by getting beat up in the sixth grade for standing up for my mom’s invented enunciation.  “Spatoola.”  Thanks, mom.)

My next idea involved experimenting with a fat brush and black ink.  Over the last few years  I have begun to understand the supreme power of a well made mark and my new instincts led me to believe that bold brush strokes would translate into a successful logo.

By the end, a few graceful gestures proved most effective and I was left in appreciation of how the process of making a logo was in essence a series of simplifications.  It was a most enlightening lesson.

The final, vaguely featherlike logo:

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2011 at 10:10 pm and is filed under favorite spots, mediocre graphic design, wildlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.