Logo Design - From Start to Finish.

Logo Design Process:

The task we were set was to use Adobe Illustrator and create a logo for another fictional company, however this time rather than it being random we were given the option of what we could do, it had to come from either a film or a TV series where a company didn't have a logo etc an example of this is would be the company 'Weyland Corp' which comes from the films Alien and have featured heavily in the new Prometheus film, and there for a logo has been designed and that is the bases for creating the logo. 

Background Information:

 So the idea behind my first logo was going to be a logo from one of the coffee shops out of the reality tv series Made in Chelsea, however the flaw behind this was that because the show is real life it meant creating the logo for the coffee shop was harder to do. So instead I went with the fictional genetics company from the brand new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The company that I was going to focus on was "Saks Industries" even though we see a company card with the logo on I still felt that I could expand on this to make it more creative so this was the start of my project. 

Research Ideas/Designs:

Because the logo needed to focus on the the ideas of genetics and the logo had to portray that kind of idea, so I began researching everything science based and genetics. For example I looked at things like double helix's, genetic structures and DNA strands, these were the basis for my sketches and designs. 

Here I have scanned in my hand drawn images which help finally create the end image/logo. 

Hand drawn sketches 

Hand Drawn Sketches 2

Designing the Logo:

Here I will begin to show how I constructed my logo. 

Here I started by creating the curves for my logo I wanted to try and make a modern/contemporary helix that looked good as a logo design. 

I also decided that the text would look in a very slim strong font, and by making using an abbreviation it makes the text look smarter and much more sci-fi text.

On this version of the logo we can see that I have smoothed over the black curve at either ends making it look a lot more professional and neat. Then to achieve the other red curve I simply copied the other curve and add flipped the image. However I did on the red curve edited some of the points to make extend and length the curve. 

I also changed the colour of the text by making the 'K' the same colour as the curve and then attaching the curve to the end of K, this I felt brought the logo together making it look better than when the text was separate from the logo itself.

After I had finally fixed the curves and text I went about adding the line to the curves to make it look like a double helix.  My only issue with this was deciding on how to structure and define the lines on the logo. I  tried several different effect on this for example I tried the chalk effect, and also just a simple straight line, I still however felt like something was lacking so tried some other effects.

As you can see from the two images above I have edited several different lines, for example on the picture on the left hand side there are two different types of lines, there's the chalk thick line and the thin lines towards the bottom. I still feel however that these lines just don't look right, to try and solve this problem I just kept on messing around with types of lines that are available on Adobe Illustrator. However on the right hand side I finally find a line that I feel will be able to use properly and make it look better and more professional. 

Finished Logo


Here is the finished logo and a feel that it is a rather professional logo. the only major flaw I feel with this is the lines on the logo, I feel they are not up to standards but I still feel the logo still looks good. I an especially happy with the gradient black and red I used on the lines to try and make them look integrated. I also brightened the red colour to make the logo stick out a bit make it look more interesting.   

Film Poster Design - From Start to Finish

Background Information:

So for the final project we were tasked to create a film poster for one of our favourite movies. My first idea was to create a poster for Tim Burtons Alice in Wonderland, I wanted to create for this a rather contemporary film poster, this meant for the research phase of this project my focus surrounded film posters that were contemporary and modern. 

Research:

http://ollymoss.com/ - Olly Moss was my first port of call, It is here were I got several ideas about what I wanted my film poster to look like and how I would set it out. I particularly liked his posters designs from the Jungle Book and Star Wars. I loved how they used a head silhouette, and then used a key scene from the movies or aspects of the movies in the silhouette. 

It was after looking at these I decided to base my film poster on Tomb Raider, after this being a movie franchise a couple of years back I decided to create a modern up to date movie poster. This time though I used to 2013 release of the game as the topic for the film poster. The game focuses on Lara becoming a survivor instead of this wise innocent girl. 

I decided that my next move would be to look at older film poster from all of the Tomb Raider franchise and see what featured as a key image/aspect of the movies and posters. In most of these films there is a focus on the double hand pistols, or the artefacts that Lara is out to discover.

Hand Drawn Sketches of example film posters

Creating the Poster: 

So here Im going to show how I created my my film poster. 

As you can see I haven't shown any screenshots of how I created any of the text and how I added in the poster credits and captioning. I used one of the quotes from IMDb which basically helps to highlight what some of the most important quotes from the video games itself.

I decided with the text than rather leaving it in one colour I capitalised certain words and put them in white help emphasis the meaning of the video game/film. I also overlapped and spaced out the title 'Tomb Raider' and tried to keep it fairly similar to the actual video game makers title and logo. 

Gun Silhouette 

So for the centre image I decided to focus on Tomb Raiders trade mark equipment of the hand gun, In every poster and in the video games as well Lara is always seen to have the the double hand pistols. So I used this as my centre image, However just a black gun in the middle of the poster didn't look very effect so I defiantly had to change it and create something better. 

Tomb Raider 2013

The image above is taken from the Tomb Raider game, and I felt that the image was perfect to use for this film poster. It shows Lara learning how to become a survivor and not this innocent girl who can't fend for herself. I once again decided that the image would look better in black and white, however I thought that if I emphasised the flame coming off of the arrow it would draw more attention and highlight the fact that Lara is a dangerous women. 

Tomb Raider Fire Highlight  2013
By selecting the fire it meant I was able to create the flame to look darker and much more dangerous, I changed it by changing the curves, editing the contrast and brightness and by making the filter on the fire a more of an orangey colour.  However though I decided to change it back to just black and white, because by having the flame in the image it ruined the look of the image and I felt it didn't work as well when the image was in black and white. 

Adding image to gun/ gradient fill
Okay so here I managed to copy the silhouette of the gun and cut into the image to make it look like the image look the same shape as the gun, I did however add a gradient effect that starts in the bottom of the gun, and then gradually clears towards the end of the pistol. I felt this created a pretty good look on the gun itself.  

Final Poster

So here is the final poster, again I feel this another professional looking piece but like all the other projects it does have its flaws. I would have liked the 'Tomb Raider' to have been a little bolder and the font to have looked and bit chunkier. I would have also liked to have had to guns instead of one but when practising this I felt that the poster looked to crowded so I decided to keep the single gun. 

Album Cover - From start to Finish

Starting the Album Cover:

For designing the album cover we were given three separate links to help us choose and create a random fictional album cover. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Random

http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

https://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

We were asked to use Wikipedia Random Article to select the name for our fictional band, once clicking random article in wiki we then used the title of the article as our bands name I was give 'Boulevard' which ended up working quite well for my album cover. 

The song title or title for the album cover was then chosen by using quotations page and by selecting the last four or five words, from the very last quote at the bottom of the page. I was given the title of "Work a little harder" which I thought to be quite ironic once I had found my image for the album cover.

For the image for the album cover we used flickr and had to choose the last image of the first line. This was the image before I edited it into the an album cover, the picture is of an office building purely made of these glass windows and a poor man who has been given the awful duty of cleaning the windows.

Creating the Album Cover:

Now that I had everything I needed to create the album cover I started production on it, creating and editing the images and placing everything. 

So I first started by editing the image itself before adding on any information such as the band name and title of the fictional album.

Starting Image 

Editing Image 1


I first started by selecting just the building and then inverting the selected area to selecting the sky, my idea was to try and make the colour of the sky a darker blue so it adds a burst of colour to image rather than just keeping it black and white. 

Sky Edit Image 2

This image shows the sky full edited, I used the curves tool on Photoshop to create this image. By lowering the curve point it means that it darkens the sky and keeps the clouds the bright white colour, rather than filling in the section with the paint bucket and editing the opacity and fill percentage, this would have made the sky just blue rather than keeping the detail of the clouds and the sky.

However once I had finished editing the image like this I decided that it didn't work well like this and decided to scrap this idea and try a different route on editing this image.

Contrast and Brightness Image Editing

After scraping the blue sky idea, I decided it would be best to the image in black and white because of the intricate design of the building, the focus was taken away from the building and focused peoples attention more towards to sky.

However I did then decide I wanted to emphasis the features of this building so I edited the image into black and white, and then changed the contrast and brightness.

By changing the contrast on the image it emphasised the metal structure of the windows and highlighted the amazing design of the buildings windows. I did decide that I would leave the brightness as it was as by changing this didn't make to much of a difference to the image.

Typography Edit:

Red Typography

Once the image had finally been finished and edited to a standard that I was happy with I started adding the typography. I added the album title and and the band name.

This version of the album cover I kept the font in a large bold font and filled the colour with a deep red colour, I felt that the red colour was the only colour that was able to stand out more against the black and white image. I had also decided to use the guideline on Photoshop to help try and place the font in a more creative way and give it a more interesting appearance.

I did however decide that it would be creative to put the text on its side (Boulevard: Band Name)  and then by adding the title of the album by fitting in between the the 'L' in the 'Boulevard' band name title. I also kept the text in white. I did however decide that this didn't look right at the time so decided to edit it again.

Edited Typography White Boulevard

So for this example of edited work I decided that there wasn't a colour that was clear enough to see the text clearly and properly. So I decided to add a rectangle block of colour this then made it easier to see the text on the photo album. I decided to keep the colour scheme black and white, so I put both bits of text in white and make the text bold. 

I then decided that the text needed to add something else, I felt that the text looked too plain and uncreative. So I edited the text again. 

Black and White Gradient Effect

Here we finally see a part of the finished album cover, I added a gradient black and white filter effect to the Boulevard test this I felt this broke up all the solid colour up and made the text look much more enticing and visually pleasing. I did as well change the length of the black box and slimmed it down to make it look less chunky, however in the final image I did make the box look larger.

FINAL PRODUCT:

This is the final album cover design for the 'Boulevard' the fictional band, I feel that there are some more things that I could have edited and finished however I decided that I did in fact like the rough edges that the image has. I personally like the image as it and feel like its a professional piece.