Logos

These are some logos (with brief descriptions) that I designed as part of a Logo Book that is in my portfolio.

The inspiration for "Just Desserts" came from the way bakers will decorate and write on pastries with very tasty syrup (sweets are my weakness). So I decided to have the logo written in syrup. Whether the flavor is raspberry or chocolate is left up to your interpretation!

This design for Yoga Zone is intended to promote the feeling of high energy along wholeness and well-being.

Generate is a newsletter that I designed for a class project. It would be published monthly by a college art department and feature contemporary graphic artists. I guess my designs tend to sway toward an industrial look since I also use gears as part of my personal portfolio identity. But this masthead's use of industry is meant to project the idea of graphic design having a functional purpose in the commercial world.

This logo is for a wedding planning company. I didn't want to stray too far from the typical wedding look so that potential customers would know right away what type of events the company handles, so the calligraphic font helped in that way. And the lines that frame the name of the company are meant to indirectly reference the back of an envelope.

This one is pretty self-explanatory. I think the cow horns really give it a fun country look.

For "Choice Dentistry", the extension of the C as an underscore is simply a visual effect within the logo, but it would be a useful tool in advancing the identity of the company later on in things such as handouts and other promotional items since the C with the line attached is very recognizable.

In the midst of my logo book making I decided to satisfy an impulse I've always had to redesign the logo for my dad's company. The concept behind the one they have now isn't bad, but I think the idea could have been executed better. So I designed it as if I was a designer coming in and updating the company's look instead of changing it completely.

 

In going along with the current logo idea, the M represents a steady growth in productivity despite the inevitable ups and downs a company will face. It is meant to reference a company chart, but right now it looks kind of like mountains. So I made it a simple black line with a subtle graph chart behind it. Then I added a brush stroke to the line to make it look like someone marked the chart by hand with a pen. This projects the idea of there being a personal human touch to the work they do. 

This is a design for a contest the SHSU Writing in the Disciplines program held in order to determine their new logo. Mine wasn't the winner, but I was still pretty happy with it. The purpose of the program is to help college professors at Sam Houston State better implement writing into their courses. The instructions were that the logo should represent the concept of writing in some way and should be appealing to the group of people who will be using the program, college professors.

My design resolution was to frame the name of the group within the confines of a sheet of paper with a staple at the top left, a sight which many professors are familiar with. Writing is obviously the focus of the program, so that became the main focus of the words, displayed larger and in a handwritten font in order to get the idea of student writing across even further.

Logo Design

A friend of mine decided to start up a college designated driving program called Safeway and asked if I would design the logo for it.

The program would attempt to reduce the amount of drunk driving on the streets in a college town. They would provide a service similar to a free taxi ride for anyone who had had too much to drink, with a promotional focus on college students. I was really excited about this idea!

To start, they wanted a look of professionalism and dependability. The image of the stop sign (though not in traditional colors) adds a sense of urgency of responsibility to the logo, and the serif font (Minion Pro) seems comfortable and safe, just the look that the founder wanted. At first, all of the letters in Safeway were going to be black, but that looked a little harsh against the yellow stop sign, so I added a gradient of black to light blue to the letters.

Billboard Design

Verizon becomes Verithin

This was for a group project I was a part of. Our Sam Houston Art Department has a billboard that the Graphics 4 class is responsible for designing each semester.

The assignment was to come up with a spoof of an existing logo in order to promote a social cause or issue. Our group decided to go with an idea I proposed: Verizon becomes Verithin.

The design works well simply because there was no change in the visual aesthetic. The same red gradient that made up the "z" is now transferred to a "t", and the red check mark looks exactly the same. The fact that it is a "very thin" check mark helps promote the idea even more. The tagline was important for getting the message across to the viewer, so we decided to change the "Can you hear me now? Good." to "Am I pretty now? Good." Upon reading this, the viewer can then understand that this is a statement about eating disorders. One glance at the website reference in the corner further confirms this idea.

Then began the actual transfer to the billboard. No easy task.

We started at night because we needed to use a projector to outline the design onto the board. Here we are taping it out.

Zach traces it with a marker while Steven shows him how far off he is. It's harder to trace a fuzzy line of light than you think!

The next day, we began painting in the black letters. It took a lot of precision, even with the tape.

I clean up the edge around the "e" with a little bit of white while Katherine begins on the "t".

We struggled a lot with getting the right gradient, but we eventually decided the best way was to blend in white.

Shawn starts on the check mark.

And I finish up with the gradient, while Zach touches up the website at the bottom. He was so trusting. I could have dropped paint right on his head!

Finished!

"Am I pretty now? Good."

Root Beer Label Design

Working on this design was really fun. The project consisted of coming up with a name, logo and bottle label design for a fictional root-beer company. I chose for my company to produce an all-natural type of root-beer, so it was important that the design reflect that.

Even though the root-beer is all-natural and healthier than most other sodas, I still wanted the name and design to be similar to regular sodas, as if this is the new all-natural drink, one that still has that cool, real-soda sort of edge to it. So Spiral became the name. It seemed like a word that had potential for being flexible in the area of design and that would be catchy and easy to implement as a soda name.

The logo (seen here in color, grayscale, and smaller sizes) needed to have a soft, natural feel. I began by using a lot of green, but this caused the problem of making Spiral look like an off-brand of Sprite. So I changed the main lettering to brown in the logo and later used lots of browns in the bottle label design as well. For the logo, I used the Gotham Nights font, which I made into outlines and adjusted slightly by increasing the thinness and thickness of the letters. I also added the white inner lines to add interest and give the letters a three-dimensional feel. The leaf, spiraling over to become the dot of the eye adds a natural element, and the hand-written font used for "All Natural Root Beer" also increases the organic feel.

The bottle became a real adventure as I set out to add some type of spiraling element to it. I eventually decided on having a curve in the label itself. There is a break in the wrap-around in order to emphasize this curve, which is the edge of the background behind the logo.

The ingredients in turn take on a spiraling format themselves, as they run along the edge of this curve on the other side of the break.

The finished product from different angles. You can see how the curve of the bottle label lends itself nicely to the idea of a spiral.

Print Ad

This is a print ad-page for www.confidencemanual.com. I wanted to do something creative with letter and word arrangement, so I found a way to visually represent the word "Self-reflection".

The layout is very simple and basic. Black bars across the top and bottom of the page help to frame the content against a white background. Uncluttered is a good feel for this type of website.

Logo and Menu Design

Fresh Options Ordered and Delivered, or F.O.O.D., is a hypothetical company that was thought up by a class group I was a part of. Our assignment was to come up with a company and all the operational procedures of that company and then to essentially sell our product/service to the class in a group presentation. My part in this project consisted of creating a logo, menu, and brochure design. Quite a relief because it would have been a disaster to put me in charge of the budget. I have fragile math skills.

F.O.O.D. is a company that provides a way for college students to have healthy food options. It serves mostly organic food that can be ordered online, over the phone, or through text message and is then delivered directly to the student's dorm or apartment. It sounded like a pretty nice concept by the time we were through brainstorming.

I wanted the design for F.O.O.D. to be appealing to young people of course, so I thought about the new kind of design trends we are starting to see. I'm certainly no expert when it comes to predicting the future of design, but it seems like a lot of new designs are leaning toward the minimalist look. The best example I can think of is the new Pepsi logo. It's in all lower case letters and the font is thin and basic, but also soft because it is curved. I like how the lowercase use of the font gives it a very understated feel. So in an attempt to give off this same look, I chose the Eurostile font for the logo. It is also a basic, slightly rounded font. The menu design is very simple too, using mostly this font and only two colors: black and green.

Menu Front

The layout for the menu is unique in its ability to implement the logo not just by placing the logo on or in it somewhere, but by using the letters of the logo to map out its dimensions. The "F" and "D" are actually the dimensions of the piece. So that makes the "D" shape a die cut since the curve of the "D" is the edge of the item. The menu, when closed, is about 5" x 5.5". The design is compact in order to be good for storing in a limited space area such as a small dorm desk drawer. This is a picture of what it looks like from the front when closed. The part that makes up the front panel is the F.O.O. and the vertical black bar of the D. Once opened, the D is a part of the middle, as seen below.

Menu Middle

Corporate Identity Design

Bob Luby's Seafood Grill is a restaurant located in Huntsville, Tx. It is a very casual sit down restaurant, but the prices are not very casual since they serve seafood, so the revamping of their logo and company identity needed to reflect both of these qualities.

Some of my inspiration came from the fish tank they have with lots of different little fish in it. They really add to the ambience of the restaurant. So, with the inspiration of a goldfish I designed the logo first.

Letterhead

The letterhead allowed me to delve deeper into a "seaside restaurant" feel with the simple wave-like stroke across the top. Some people see a fishing pole when they look at this, and that coincides with the theme as well.

Envelope

I decided the envelope needed to be a continuation of our fish theme with a transparent fish shape across the right side. The managers often send out gift cards, coupons, and store promo items to customers. Therefore, having an envelope that is eye catching will help ensure that the message doesn't get thrown out with the rest of the not-so-interesting junk mail. 

Promotional Items

Coupons

Billboard

A major problem that Bob Luby's struggles with is their location. Their restaurant is right along the feeder road of Interstate 45, but many people don't know what exit to take to get there and end up passing it up. So a billboard would help tremendously with this.

Business Card

The business card is by far the most daring design of this set. It is the size and shape of a normal business card, except there is a perforated edge across the top that connects a coupon to the other side. So when a manager hands their business card to someone, there is also a promotional item attached to it.

And just to add a little flare to the card, there is a fish tail sticking out the top once the coupon is torn off.

<--- Business card 

with coupon disconnected.

<--- Coupon disconnected from business card. The perforated edge runs across this side, and the tail would just be a cutout, remaining on the top of the business card.

Invitation Design

Fiddler on the Roof

One of my all-time favorite plays is Fiddler on the Roof. How could you not love a story with dancing Russians in it? In coming up with an invitation design, I wanted it to have a playful, energetic feel along with a touch of seriousness -- just like the play. I pulled some images from the play and added in of few of my own. In the middle of the invitation, there is an ominous, stormy sky in the background used to represent the political unrest of the time the play is set in. And even though the play isn't technically about a roof, I implemented a lot of wood textures just to sort of play off of the title.

Middle

Working with a pop-up was a lot of fun. It helped to add a whimsical effect to the piece and hopefully a smile to the face of the recipient along with a "maybe I'll go to this event" response.

It was important to use an appropriate picture for the pop-out so that the pop-out wouldn't be interesting only because it's a pop out. I thought about some of the funniest parts of the play and remembered the trouble Tevye goes through in dealing with his nagging wife. So the part of the invitation that pops out when it is first opened is Tevye's face and shoulders, as if he can't wait to get out of the room as she fusses at him from behind. I thought it looked cute.

Magazine Ad

Book Cover

"Shooting Dad" is a short story by Sarah Vowell in which the author comically reveals the tension between her and her father caused by political differences. One of the topics they strongly disagree on is gun control.

Designing the book cover for "Shooting Dad" required striking a delicate balance between the seriousness of political discussion and the hilarity of family arguments. From reading the story, I got the sense that there were always metaphoric bullets flying throughout the Vowell household, and I wanted the cover to show that. Pulling from a quote within the book about "hunter's orange [never being her] favorite color" I designed the cover with a hunting theme in mind, thus implementing greens and oranges. The font is a military font, complimented by a hand drawn "Dad" lettering to lighten the tone. Brush strokes also helped to lighten the look.

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