When I start the process of designing a logo, I either look at the preexisting company values and mission statement or I think about what I want the brand to represent.
Before I even think about opening Adobe Illustrator, I start by sketching whatever comes into my head and I go from one sketch to the next until I end up with a page full of designs. Sometimes I even find a design that I like within the first few sketches.
After the sketching process is done, I move into Illustrator and start thinking about colors and shapes that are more defined. For Zaiko's logo, my team already had a set of colors in place, so I went ahead and applied the colors to see how they would fit with the logo before moving to final production.
Illustrator is where I design all of my logos. I first learned how to use Illustrator in my freshman year of college. Ever since then, it is my favorite tool for anything related to graphic design.
Zaiko Inventory
Zaiko Inventory was created for my senior capstone project. This logo was pretty challenging to create because we wanted to create a professional logo that successfully communicated that our app was an inventory system. I started by sketching designs on my iPad, going through a lot of different designs. I eventually moved from drawing logo marks to logotypes where I drew the final design. I started playing around with the style of the letters and the sizes. I drew the A in Zaiko larger than the other letters to create more interest and movement in the logo. The nick in the letter i was added to create the dot over the i. When all was said and done, the logotype still didn't really communicate that our brand was an inventory system. To solve this issue, I added an abacus on the right side of the logo because they are associated with math and counting. I also added the word inventory below to solidify the inventory brand.
UI/UX Design Club
Kennesaw State University has a UI/UX Design Club with over 200 students registered. I was tasked with redesigning the logo for the club, because the old one wasn't related to UX design. Just like all of my other processes, I started sketching ideas. For this project, I was trying to think about UX design and what tools we mainly use. Figma and Illustrator were the first ones that came to mind, so I started thinking about tools that I could mimic in my design. Initially I wanted to recreate a line using the pen tool, however this represented a more graphic design type than UX design. The president of the club ended up liking the logo I created that recreated a box being drawn around the text with the mouse icon.
Katherine Lanham Design
For my portfolio, I created a logo myself using Illustrator. I initially drew my initials on my iPad, so I uploaded the image into Illustrator and traced it with the pen tool.
Plant Parent
This logo was created for a project in my class Visual Design 2. Our final project was centered around creating a new brand with 3 assets. I proposed a company called "Plant Parent," an online blogging space for people to ask professionals for plant advice. I wanted the brand to have a comforting and welcoming quality so that users would feel comfortable reaching out. When I created the logo for this project, I had the image of the popular icons of mothers holding their children. I took this idea to my sketches where I came up with the final design as shown. Moving into Illustrator, I created variants of different colors and styles. I also added the logotype with a calm font.
Sam Flax
For my class Visual Design 1, we had a similar final project, except we had the option to also rebrand a company. For this class, I chose to rebrand the art store Sam Flax. I started out by looking at their mission statement and company values that they already had established, and I referred back to those in my design process. As usual, I sketched out different ideas that I had until it filled up my page, and moved into Illustrator for the final design.
Addie
In Interactive Design 2, I created the logo for my team. The app was for an ADHD productivity app, so I wanted to bring psychology into the design with the brain icon. Part of the brain icon was also creating a character that would serve as the mascot of the app. I experimented with a lot of different fonts before I ended up altering the serif font I initially had. I curved the edges of the serifs for a more welcoming feel.
%402x.svg){kind=icon}