Logo.

The second task to my design research portfolio was to design a logo for a fictional company or organisation from a favourite film, book, tv series or game. I chose the TV series True Blood and have designed a logo for a drink's label of the true blood beverage that features in the series.

 This was the initial idea for my true blood beverage drink. The process of this design was straight forward and involved creating the border by increasing the pt to approximately 25pt. Then using the rectangle tool in illustrator to create the border. This achieved proximity through the use of containment by using the border and also white space to group the components of the logo together.




I then developed the concept of using an image from true blood, this time using a character from the Tv series. I took the principle of contrast and manipulated this image in photoshop at first altering the light and saturation levels. I then went to layer-layer style- and thresold. The edges looked rough so next I put the image back into illustrator and used ""live trace" to smoothen out the edges. This image wasn't sucessful using this technique because the background was too busy and so the features of the characters were difficult to pick out.

 This was the most effective image using this techinique and therefore this is the image I have chosen this image to use in my logo design.










 Instead of having a white background in for my second logo design I looked at using a contrasting background and chose red. Here I also experemented with a vintage styled font and edited into an arc shape just like the other beer labels I looked at.

 

However the typography for this doesn't suit the genre of the programe but editing the text so that it was in an arc made the logo appear more like a bottle label. 

This was an experiment with with typeface and also the allignment and proximity of the logo design.

The selected font for this logo is called "cracked" in illustrator.

I then decided that the font type I was going to use was "cracked". I started to experiment by creating droplets of blood on illustrator. By only doing droplets of blood on one side went against the design principle of allignment because it looked uneven.

To create this effect in illustrator, I drew a straight line approx 6pt and then selected the pen tool to anchor at least 4 points inside the line. This is shown in the third red line towards the right hand side. The blue dots are the anchors. From adjusting these I could create the shape I wanted the droplets to be.  For example like this....

I then merged the droplets of blood onto the letters, again using anchors where it helped. I did this to make it look like the font was dripping blood. This was also apropritate for the name of the show true blood. 

Timothy Samara says that "A grin is one appraoch to organising visual information to aid communication. It is a method to help solve complex communication problems." and that "Allignment between masses and voids visually connect or separate them" For example the allignment wasn't very effective in this design and isn't aesthetically pleasing because there is a gap in the bottom right hand corner. To solve this problem I considered adding an age limit to the label to balance the proximity of components in this logo.

This is my final logo design. Through the development of my ideas, the basic prinicples of graphic design have ensured that I have created an effective and visually appealing logo.