Idea and Inspiration

For this logo I decided to go with a simplistic design that gave off a sophisticated yet creative vibe. The logo is for a childcare marketing company; that is why the crayon played an important part in the design. In order to take it from a very business savvy design, I was able to add the crayon to add a design related to the field the marketing is for. 

Design Process

I was scrolling through some pictures I recently took at a chldcare center and I found a prominent one that stuck out to me. The image was of a little boy holding a crayon straight ahead. In the photo the crayon was the main focus, so I immediately started thinking of ways to make it the main focus in my logo. The crayon symbolizes childcare centers and it fit perfectly as the I in digital. I really wanted the logo to be professional with a reference to childcare as well. 

When looking into a lot of logos for childcare centers, I was finding a lot of over the top child-like designs. To me, I felt it was catering to the kids, where it should be catering to the adults of the kids. For a marketing company being hired by childcae centers I wanted to make sure I referenced childcare creativity in a very strategic way that displayed proffesional and creative boundaries. The process for this design was very straight forward. I began by researching childcare marketing companies and their logos, this gave me an idea of what I did not want to do. I then decided to take a look in my own image folder to find inspiration. Once I found the crayon image I immediately started sketching ways to adapt it with the digital marketing wording. I also wanted to be able to add the name of the company in as well, without taking from the crayon design. I came up with multiple sketches, originally I liked the idea of including a sketch of the kid holding the crayon, but I quickly realized it took from the balance of the logo and made it too busy. That is when I started playing around with where to add the crayon. I decided it looked best as the I, versus going directly under “digital marketing” horizontally

Technical Detail

The image I got my inspiration from came directly from my personal image collection. However for the image I did’nt utilize any outlining effects as I initially planned. Inorder to create this design I started with the creation of the crayon. I used the rectangle tool to create the main part of the crayon, followed by the  polygon tool to make the tip of the crayon. I then added two more small rectangles to put at the base ends of the rectangle shape to create a difference for where the paper typically is around a crayon. I then played around with different colors for the crayon. I chose red because it seemed very professional and stood out. For the crayon I used the color tool to add different shades to showcase the different aprts of the crayon. Inorder to make the crayon less flat I used the 3D affect. I chose to extrude and bevel the crayon putting it an off axis front. I then chose plastic shading and set the shading color as black to add the most contrast. I think usimg black shading blended in the black words in the logo as a whole. I then set the highlight to come from the top right inorder to give the crayon a nice bright red color to be showcased. For the wording, I selected the type tool for the letter ‘d’, then again for “gital” marketing. Then two more times for ‘marketing’ and ‘c.rojas’. For the rest of the logo I focused greatly on the symmatry of the words and how the fonts all played out. For the word digital I chose ariel black font becase it is a bold font that matched the style of the crayon. I then used some appealing fonts for the markting and c.rojas words. I chose big caslon medium font for marketing because I wanted it to stand alone from the rest of the logo. I broke away from the rule of using more than two fonts because I didn’t like the way c. rojas looked in the big Caslon font. I wanted the c. rojas to stand out, but be subtle and not the main part of the logo. I chose to use sign painter font to add a cursive twist, this added a professional shift to the logo without taking from the design. During my research, I found a lot of over the top logos when it came to childcare fields. I wanted to really follow the K.I.S.S rule of keeping it simple. That is why I added in the crayon as the main visual shape. Deciding how to fit all the elements together was the toughest part. I wanted to make sure there was balance between the figures and ground and a fair amount of symmetry. I orginally had the c.rojas going vertically along the flat side of the d, but it didn’t balance out the image. That is when I decided to add it at top of the digital word. I did c. rojas leaned more towards the left and marketing towards the right.  To me, this seemed like the more viually pleasing design. 

Some areas I struggled with was creating the 3D affect to the crayon. I initially attempted a bubble affect, but it took away from the proffesional aspect. The next trick was figuring out the perfect angle for the image to tilt.