My final logo!
I really liked working in this section of class, and the creative freedom that I could easily express, because Illustrator is such an easy software to use.
Since my topic is about my religion, and my journey at the institute class that they offer, I wanted to show a sense of light in my design. This would be referencing the light that this gospel brings me, and that it could bring to others through this class. I wanted to make my logo bright, and full of life. My inspiration for this was the sun. I liked the idea of the brightness and hope that is symbolized in the sun, and wanted people to feel that through my design.
For my overall design, I really liked the dashing technique from the Illustrator tutorials, and wanted to use that as a base to my design. So, for my draft I started off with creating three circles. I had attached guides to the art board, so that my design would be centered, and that the circles would be similar, but could be sized up. This also allowed for me to make them equidistant from each other. Then, I changed the stroke on each. I gave the inner one about a 45 pt stroke, then increased the following ones by 10-15 pt. This created a gradual change of length that allow for the stroke lines to look more like rays. I also changed the colors to be more analogous, so that they offered a slight gradient from the middle to the outside. I then decided that I wanted to add another ring around the very outside of the sun figure to better define the endpoints of the logo. For the lettering, I wanted to place more emphasis on the “Institute” because that is my main topic. I played with the character settings so that the letters were more spread out, and stretched across the logo. I also added an outside stroke to this, to help define the edges against the sun in the background. I also didn’t want to just have “Institute” written on the logo without some context, so I added the “LDS” to emphasize that it was affiliated with this religion.
I didn’t receive much critiques for my draft, but I was told that I needed to rework the dashes, or rays, to look less like, what one critic said, was a lemon cut in half. I was told that there needs to be more of a color change in the rays, and also to exclude outside border, which I ultimately did. After looking at my rough draft, I noticed these things also, my design looked too busy, and was not very pleasing to the eye, even though the concept was good.
I started off my revisions with trying to rework the length, and size of the dashes. This took a lot of trial and error to create a piece that had depth, but also kept with the sun symbol. I lengthened the stroke size so that they inner ring was dramatically smaller than the outside ring, with the middle one splitting the difference. This provides more contrast between the rays. I also stretched the gap between the rays, and made the width of the rays smaller. This provided for a simplified look, that utilized more of the negative space.
Another revision that I worked on was the color scheme. The first design had too similar of colors, which did not look good. So I created more of a gradient change between the rings, which looks much better.
The last change I made was the lettering. I increased the sizeof the word “Institute”, and made it stretch across the design, really emphasizing it. I increased the size of the “LDS” also.
Overall, I am really quite happy with the progress that I made on my design. It looks much more classy, and feels like it is more with the trends that are in style now.
Mackenzie Larsen 