When you have a website, you must also have a logo. So it appears. Logos can be really awesome, really boring, or really outdated and sometimes also pretty ugly. Some of them are so simple yet so powerful. Those are my favorite ones. The logos that don’t make you think too much. Yet they suggest something that you also don’t completely understand, but you get the key idea and that’s all you need. So here I go, with my company name ideawarrior, a name I came up with many years ago. I like the name. It’s a good combination of fun and funky and you would think that it would be easy to come up with something. So I make a word list, it goes something like:
Idea: lightbulb, light, ray, sun, bubbles, arrow up, van diagram
Warrior: shield, weapon, bow, arrow, horse, horseshoe, water, waving flag, dragon, bat, wings, helmet, target, shooting, bullet
I sit down and start sketching. The horse had to be drawn first to get that out of my system – everything that has a horse with it looks immediately like a riding stable. I have to draw the light bulb as it’s just so much fun. And the W really looks like a dog’s face.
Now some bat wings would look awesome, for sure!
Or how about a pirate ship? My fabulous design mentor, Stephanie Gill, said to the following rendition “And what’s up with this flag that looks like, oh, what’s the name of that country again…”, then she starts searching for it and sure enough, pulls up a country flag that doesn’t look a whole lot different than my design. Bummer! We both laugh. Abandon.
Back to the drawing board. I am thinking maybe I should just keep it to the two letters I and W. I draw a few of those ideas.
Nothing stands out here either. So I finally stop the hand sketching (after admittedly drawing an entire series of shields with IW letters on them), and move into Illustrator. It gets to be a little more fun right away as happy accidents happen. I want to do something in particular and just mess around with the tools and without too much intent, I get an interesting effect going.
But first I start with my favorite color tool, Kuler Adobe, and create a nice color palette that will work with the colors of my website https://ideawarrior.com. I am ready to go.
Here’s the first logo I came up with:
Cute, but a little too much color, so the yellow had to be eaten up by negative space instead. I grabbed the font from fabulous www.dafont.com. It’s called Caviar Dreams by Lauren Thompson. I like it. I am not sure it is quite right for my logo, but overall I really like Caviar Dreams.
A happy accident happens with the radar chart and I arrive at this:
Then I return to my letters but quickly decide this won’t work – something looks funky, and Stephanie nails it “I read this like Wide Warrior“. Abandon.
This is where I am at. The version that is currently live on my site is what I like best at the moment, but this exploration will continue, that is for sure!
For today, all the best.
Christina
zentai Store says
Hi would you mind stating which blog platform you’re working with?
I’m planning to start my own blog in the near future but I’m having a
difficult time making a decision between BlogEngine/Wordpress/B2evolution and Drupal.
The reason I ask is because your design and style seems different then most blogs and I’m looking for something unique.
P.S Apologies for being off-topic but I had to ask!
ideawarrior says
Hi there! Sorry for late response. It is WordPress, self-hosted. That’s why the design looks slightly different. I made some minor tweaks.
GREETINGS!
Christina