Dive In: A Logo Exploration

A few days ago I finally broke and got a Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch tablet. I’ve wanted a tablet for some time because I have always felt I’m decent at freehand drawing (of some things at least). I’m still getting used to it but it is allowing me to dive into a new design field – logo design.

Generally anytime you’ve seen a logo from me it is always just text with a basic effect or two applied (sometimes) and occasionally some icon composed of free png images found throughout the web. I’m hoping I can eliminate at least some of that by creating my own matching symbols / icons whenever possible.

So, for the last two days I’ve been messing around in both Photoshop and Illustrator, trying my luck at new concepts while adjusting to the tablet. These are a few I worked on today. Those who have followed myself for a while (anyone?) might know a previous tagline of mine used in the past on my portfolio – summer inspired design. It’s true that I hate the winter, and because of that I try to reflect “summer elements” in as much of my work as possible. Be it a light and airy color scheme or the use of a lot of white space — I like to keep things clean and fresh.

The concepts below are just that – concepts. The first three are for the fictional site “Surfstrm” (Surfstream; of course any possible surf related domain I could think of was taking). The fourth and fifth concepts simply allowed me to experiment with drawing a fish in the same way I have always drawn one while bringing it into a digital age and spicing it up.

I am still in the midst of completing the labs page and blog archives, but please feel free to share your thoughts on these couple of ideas. More to come soon and hopefully some real logos in the near future!