Over the last week, I have shared my initial concepts for an Otisflix (my home media streaming server) logo. Yes. I am a nerd. How many of you have your own personal streaming service?! Those who know me know that I don’t do anything halfway. So, I had to create a logo for this.
When I create a logo, I spend many hours playing with concepts. As Aaron Draplin, of Draplin Design Company, says, “Vectors are free”. What that means is that it costs nothing to copy a design concept and alter it slightly. By doing this, you allow yourself to constantly ask “What If…”. What if I make this element green? What is I use two fonts in one word? What if I place this in a shape? It may very well be that you hit a grand slam on your first swing. Any baseball fan will tell you that hitting grand slams on one swing is kind of rare. In fact, a really good hitter will fail to reach base 65-70% of the time. What does that tell you? Keep swinging. After creating dozens of concepts, I may very well have come back to my first idea.
There was nothing wrong with this concept. Nothing at all. It is clean. It is legible. It is colorful. This could be successful. However, using the “What if…” technique allowed me to get all the way to this.
Now this. This is fun and totally different than my first concept. There still needs to be a few little tweaks but this is pretty close. Logo design, as with all art, is fluid. There are no steadfast rules that say how long you should work on something or how many iterations it takes to get a “Final”. There is a famous quote (I think it comes from Milton Glaser [he created the I Heart NY logo]) who said, when asked how long it would take to create a logo… “I’ll know when it is done”. I’m paraphrasing but the idea is that you can’t give a specific time frame. You just know. As for the Otisflix logo, I just know. This is almost done. Here is a glimpse of the concepts that got me from point A to point B. To be honest, this a quick design process. Often times, I will end up with a dozen or more artboards in Illustrator. Each new thought gets an artboard to itself where I will explore ideas on that single concept. Play! It’s art, it should be fun!
