WHAT THEY ASKED FOR: Anthony entered the lucky dip with this request:
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: 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!
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 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 🙂
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