HI, I love the designs you’ve done and wanted to take the risk. Me and a friend have started a media business called Peridian Media and since were students we don’t have the money to pay for a super expensive logo. We plan on making commercials for businesses, but we also want to make fun youtube videos. Our videos will be different than your average low budget commercial with more passion in every video. Thank you, Dan.
WHAT THEY GOT:Â The name Peridian Media didn’t spark any ideas for me but there was something in Dan’s request that jumped out – they wanted to have ‘more passion in every video’.
A quick brainstorm later and I came up with the idea of showing a heart-shaped play button to capture this slogan. The first rendition can be seen below.
First idea: Love heart turned sideways to look like a heart-shaped play button.
I still kind of like this idea and think I may even prefer it for it’s simplicity.
However I went ahead and chased an idea I had to illustrate the notion of more passion in every video by using concentric hearts.
I saw some of the stuff you do on Reddit and thought I should look at your work. A lot of it is really creative and beautiful so I thought I’d give it a shot. A few friends of mine and I are opening a small nightclub in a Japanese city where there are few places to go. I had been following your posts on Reddit for a while and thought I should definitely send you a message when it came to the logo design.
I’m really interested in seeing how you would interpret “Echo”. The bar is pretty sleek, modern type of place. Not super sophisticated, just fun, Please let me know if you decide to do it. Thanks!
WHAT THEY GOT:Â How do I design a logo for a sound of a sound? How do I create something visual out of something aural?
To get started I listed a few of the things that first popped into my mind when thinking about the word ‘echo’.
Standing on the edge of a cliff (or in an underground carpark) and shouting. Basically the location of where you’re most likely to hear an echo.
Sound waves
Speech bubbles
Sounds reverberating and bouncing back at you
Echo location
I couldn’t do much with the first option. It turns out I couldn’t do much with the second or third options either – I tried turning the ‘H’ from ‘ECHO’ into sound waves but it ended up looking like a sideways stickman when I added the ‘O’ at the end; and the speech bubble option just didn’t suit the brief (for the record I had ‘EC’ in one speech bubble and ‘HO’ in the other talking back to the ‘EC’).
The fourth option got me thinking about a ball bouncing around. I liked this idea, although it wasn’t very visually exciting to just draw a circle.
The fifth option got me thinking about bats and dolphins. I ruled out dolphins but liked the idea of using a bat for a nightclub because they are nocturnal. Now if only I could draw a logo of a bat without making it look like Batman!
Do I look like Batman?
Back to the idea of the ball. I really felt like there was something in this idea and then it hit me – why not use an ambigram to symbolise the concept of sound bouncing back as the same sound.
Easier said than done (ever tried to draw an ambigram before?).
The rest of the brief was met pretty easily by making the colour of the ball red to reflect the Japanese flag.
I look the same upside down
I couldn’t help creating a variant of the logo using the bat idea because I liked the way the bat hanging upside down and right way up emphasised the ambigram. I added the word ‘nightclub’ for the same reason.
I hope you like it Anthony!
LIKE IT OR NOT: You better, it took me a while 🙂
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR:Â I saw your post on Reddit and wanted to reach out because your designs are awesome. My wife and I have started a new project-it is a total hobby with little hope of making back what we are spending on it. However, we are having a lot of fun.
The project is a blog that reviews restaurants from a vegetarian perspective. It has a quirky name, veggingoutdc.com but we need a cool logo. Can you help?
WHAT THEY GOT: OK, before I start – I know what you’re thinking… ‘flattery will get you everywhere’. And you’d be half right – it does feel pretty good to hear someone say my ‘designs are awesome’ but let’s wait to see if Jonathan still sends me the ‘one million dollars‘ he also promised (after seeing his new logo).
Annnd that’s my best attempt at humour for now (I was going to say last, but it’s still early on)…
So where do I start with a logo for ‘Vegging Out DC’?
My first train of thought went something like this (these are actual notes that I wrote down):
A couch potato sitting at a restaurant
Vegetables peeled (or jumping out of their skins)
Vegetables wearing their good clothes out to dinner
And then the ‘Ah-ha!’ moment…
A jacket potato!
(Quickly followed by a bit of self-doubt and rationalisation)
Uh-oh – is ‘jacket potato’ American?
Either way… a potato wearing a dinner jacket might still make sense
I spent a bit of time stuck on this idea until I realised it’s difficult to draw a potato wearing a jacket without it looking like Mr Potato Head.
So then I tried to force a couple of other ideas…
Garden trowel – shape of a ‘V’?
Garden trowel and pitch fork on a dinner plate? Maybe just the trowel (because a pitch fork is just too big in comparison to the hand trowel… what else goes with hand trowel?)
A hand trowel is used for digging vegetables out (literally vegging out?) and it is relaxing (figuratively vegging out?)
A trowel with a carrot handle!
A carrot knife (you should see the pictures)
After a bunch of sketches and a chat with my wife I realised that garden forks also exist. And that was pretty much the last piece of the puzzle.
All that was left to do was to draw the hand trowel and garden fork to look like some cutlery… and tweak the idea for an hour or two. Long story short, I hope you like your new logo Jonathan 🙂
LIKE IT OR NOT: Let me know in the comments below!
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR: Hi Ashley, The shop is supposed to be called “le Boudoir” , I had an idea for the logo , a human body such as on the photo 2 , cropping the photo keeping only the shape then adding the items in the bottom , such as the photo inspiration.
Amira’s Photo 2 (L) and Photo inspiration (R)
Knowing that only shapes must be in them, Le Boudoir is going to sell candles and crafts as well as recycled stuff, pop art and Tunisian design crafts
Hope that is clear
Thank you
Kindly yours
Amira
WHAT THEY GOT:Â As luck would have it the logo turned out quite different from the brief.
Well, maybe it was more because I didn’t think the idea would work.
I wanted to come up with something distinct for Amira’s logo and I didn’t feel like a silhouette filled with shapes was going to cut it, or even be recognisable at such a small size… But I did like the colours from the ‘photo 2’.
After a bit of sketching my mind started to wander off to drawing the candle flames, until one of them caught my attention… it kind of looked like hair. So I added a very basic silhouette of a woman’s face and all of a sudden I had an idea I could work with… and that’s where it ended up!
I hope you like it Amira!
LIKE IT OR NOT: Let me know in the comments below!
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR: I’m trying to start up a photography business, mostly selling landscapes taken around the Scottish Highlands where I live. I’m not really interested in shooting weddings or portraits because people can be a pain. Landscapes just stand there, perfectly happy to be photographed.
I have recently landed work shooting real estate, which I enjoy because houses are like landscapes, they don’t give you any problems really, they stand still and let me do my thing.
I’d like a logo that says professional rather than ‘fun’. The name I’m using is Garian Photography, Garian comes from Gary and Ian, Ian being my father who has provided endless support and encouragement.
WHAT THEY GOT:Â This one was frustrating!
The words ‘Scottish Highlands’, ‘photography’ and ‘landscapes’ stuck in my mind straight away and made me think of mountains and castles within the shape of a camera. OK, great – I had an idea. But the frustrating part was trying to create the right scenario for that idea to work.
I started off by drawing a basic outline of a camera. Then I added a castle to create the shape of the shutter button. Then I added a setting sun to create the lens. Then I added a mountain. Then I added the viewfinder. Then I added the ocean… and then I didn’t like it.
So I started again.
I found some inspiration in photos of Dunnottar Castle and ‘The Globe‘ at Knockan Crag but then I realised two things.
You probably shouldn’t use the likeness of iconic landmarks or sculptures in a logo (at first I actually thought ‘The Globe’ was an ancient sculpture but it turns out that it was installed in 2006 by artist Joe Smith).
Lots of people already use a camera outline as their photography logo (and it’s probably an idea that is leaning a bit more towards ‘fun’ rather than professional).
I was stuck. I had an idea in my head that I couldn’t shake and it was frustrating.
So in the end I re-read the brief a couple of times looking for clues and then I found it – that little shift in thinking that helped me refocus.
The client wanted “professional rather than ‘fun'”. Â
And just like that I had an idea to finish the design – I would remove the camera outline and just ‘focus’ on the camera lens (and now I’m even happier that I just wrote a pun).
So there you go.
LIKE IT OR NOT:Â Let me know by leaving a comment below.
GET YOUR OWN: If you’d like a Lucky Dip logo of your own, get plucky and enter the lucky dip!
What they asked for: Scott asked for a logo for Flight.Info – all about your flight. Nothing more, nothing less.
How I interpreted it: Well, it seemed pretty straight forward but half the trouble I had was overcoming an idea that formed straight away but I knew had already been done… turning the ‘f’ on it’s side and making it look like a plane in flight (like this one). But still I toyed with this idea for a while putting my own twist on it by combining the capital letters ‘F’ and ‘I’ to form a plane, but in the end I still felt it was too similar and abandoned it…
So now what do I do?
Well, a bit of quick sketching and I had a couple of new ideas to work with.
Suddenly it occurred to me; the ‘mouse pointer’ kind of looks like a paper plane – maybe I can add a little bit of detail to help make the connection and add a shadow of a ‘real’ looking plane to reinforce that connection.
So after a bit of fiddling around in Illustrator I eventually came up with the logo you see at the top of this page. Nothing more, nothing less.
I hope you enjoy the logo Scott. All the best!
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Francisco got in touch with me via Facebook looking for a logo for his brother’s random acts of kindness… here’s the request I received.
My brother has been doing random acts of kindness for some time now, from getting Christmas presents for over sixty underprivileged children in the Dominican Republic this past Christmas, helping out people in his local community and is currently working with the Vera’s Little League gathering used baseball equipment and talking them all to needy, baseball-loving kids in the Dominican Republic. In less than a month he has shipped over 600 items (Used bats, gloves, uniforms, cleats, etc.)
We have been talking and reconglizing the need for a name for this movement. He calls it “Giving Feels Awesome” and we sometime refer to it as “GFA”. If you could come up with something that represents giving and happy feelings it would make his day!
Please help.
Thank you, thatnk you thank you.
I was really humbled by their efforts and decided to see if I could help.
The Idea:
The idea for this logo really just popped in to my head as I was thinking about something else. I thought the letter ‘G’ was perfect for showing the gesture of two hands giving and receiving.
I started to scribble down some pictures of hands but had some difficulty representing the gesture of giving. By using an open hand it kind of looked more like the other hand was taking instead of giving, but after a bit of tweaking I eventually settled on a picture of an open hand at the top of the ‘G’ with a thumbs up at the bottom to represent an ‘awesome’ feeling.
A few ideas for the letter ‘G’ depicting the gesture of giving
I hope you enjoy the logo Francisco. All the best!
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When given the brief for this one, the first idea that popped into my head was to somehow cover the word ‘Artists’ as a literal interpretation of the brand…
Soooo….
The logo you see on the right is my first interpretation but I feel it may be too subtle owing to the fact that the word ‘Artists’ was becoming a little difficult to read when obscured too much with the word ‘cover’.
The logo in the middle is based on the idea that multiple artists can cover the one song so each letter/colour is a visual representation of each artists interpretation. This logo also shows a stack of CD covers layered on top of each other and is reminiscent of the ‘cover flow’ that you used to see in iTunes.
The logo on the left is a bonus idea that my wife suggested (it’s a quick throw together so I probably haven’t nailed her idea properly!) 🙂
So there you go Sparky13, I hope you like one of the logo ideas!
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Symbolic image of a red rose made up of 8 red hearts
What can I say about this latest logo design? Well, first of all I can say it has been one of the more challenging logos I’ve worked on simply because the name is very generic plus the fact there’s a bucket load of rose logos already floating around which takes up a lot of the design options. In the client’s own words…
the problem with this name is the “obvious” always looks tacky
So with that in mind, I scribbled and scrawled a bunch of options before I started roughing them out and playing with them on the computer… I liked some of them but hated most and at one point I was tempted to say “that’ll do” but stuck it out and eventually came up with what you see above.
So there you go Tim, I hope you like your logo!
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Here’s the latest Lucky Dip Logo! I had a few ideas for this one but had to pick one so went for this version (I’ll try and remember to post my page of scribble later on).
As you can see, this logo ended up showing the progressive stages of someone drawing a monkey’s face – I thought a monkey made a good choice because it helps demonstrate that learning to draw can be as easy as ‘monkey see, monkey do’. For some reason, so many people think they can’t draw but I think they just need to realise that not everyone has the same style and there is no right or wrong way to draw as long as you are having fun.
I also styled the ‘A’s to look like the ends of a pencil.
Hope you like it Scott!
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