I was recently commissioned to design a logo for Karma City Clothing, an independent clothing line with a tagline of “Influence Your Future.”
Goal
The aim was to achieve a lockup that was simple, one color (black), sleek and timeless, and could also appeal to a younger demographic.
The client already had a design in mind and presented me with a rough sketch to better illustrate his vision, which is an abstract depiction of the letters K and C combined to a single unit…
Preliminary Designs
After several exchanges of discussing ideas and insights, as well as an agreement being reached, I set off to see what I could do to enhance this concept further. The following is the first round of ideas that I presented to the client…
In an effort to improve on the initial sketch, I removed the serifs from the letter(s) to give it a more sleek look, then thickened the lines a little for a more emboldened presence as well as offering scalability — being able to recognize the logo at small sizes. I also flattened (for lack of a better term) the edges of the star to give it an edgier and more serious look, as opposed to the playful look it had previously.
Refinements
After being presented with the initial designs, the client requested to see how some combinations of these designs looked…
After various rounds of revisions, we finally arrived at a final design for the icon. It was now time to work on providing an alternate design, but with the wording included.
After a few more rounds of revisions, we were able to reach a final design, but ran into a slight dilemma. We wanted the icon to be centered within the emblem, but once centered the entire design had an unbalanced look and created the illusion that it wasn’t centered, when it was…
As illustrated above, the problem lied in the emblem being centered relative to the entire icon, including the very lightweight right side that was comprised entirely of the far right tip of the star.
The solution was to simply center the emblem relative to the K/C lettermark instead, which rectified the problem and gave the entire lockup an overall balanced look. The logo was then completed…
Disclaimer: This logo is property of its respective owner(s). Use in this post is solely for educational purposes.
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thanks
Best blogpost so far !
The problem of centering is an interesting one. I encounter it all the time that things that technically ARE centered, dont appear so visually.
A lot of this has to do with the human factor, imo. Vectorgraphics are very geometrical and accurate, while for example, a human doodling something, is not so perfect, YET can look better.
I think thats the reason why all these distressing techniques are so popular, they take away the cleanliness and add something organic (think grunge textures, distressed lines, brush fonts or vectorising watercolor textures).
It’s definitely the human factor, which is why I find myself manually kerning letters on a regular basis. There’s just no way (as far as I know) for a computer to know how the average human eye is going to interpret something, then make the adjustments accordingly. The human factor comes into play very often, and it’s something I’m explaining to clients regularly. Thanks Christian! Glad you liked the post. I’ll definitely be making more of these posts. They seem to be getting good responses.
Hey, Nick! I love your jobs and how you use Inkscape. I really feel so good when I see these.
But I have a question, Nick. This logo, for example is for a clothing line and I think it’ll need some print files as business card and so on. How do you do it in Inkscape? I read your machine has a Windows partition. Do you do other files in Illustrator to have CMYK files?
I question you about it because I’m thinking how I’d do it. And I lost 3 clients last weeks because I’m really don’t know how to make a CMYK file in Inkscape.
Can you help me?
Hey Thiago, thanks. Glad you like my content. There’s no way to create a CMYK file in Inkscape because the software doesn’t have that capability yet. I read somewhere from an interview with a developer that they’re exploring it, so hopefully in the next release we’ll have it. I use Illustrator (via Windows partition) to output a CMYK file. I was recently told there’s a way to do this with Inkscape and Scribus if you’re using Linux, though. Check out the link: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/getting-cmyk-colors-from-inkscape-to-scribus
Got it. Yes, I use Linux too.
I’ll try to use Scribus and thanks the article. I’ll read and try, after.
Thank you so much!