Digital Diary Logo

Here i have done a digital diary for the logo I created for my media company. It covers 2 variations of the same logo and then an example of the logo sized down to business card size. The program I used for creating the logo was Adobe Illustrator as this works with vector images, which works best for drawings and cartoon styles, makes images that can be easily scaled for different uses and has small output size file.

I started in Illustrator created some simple shapes to compose my logo from. First I made a simple circle with a red fill and no stroke and then made a direct copy of this. The original circle I transform shrank down to a small size, constraining as i went to keep a good shape. The second circle i enlarged and then direct selected one of the anchor points and stretched it out to make a tear drop shape. Next I made a rounded rectangle with white fill and no stroke. I made a direct copy of this shape, by selecting it, holding the alt key and dragging it away. I shrank down this second rectangle using transform and constrain. This gave me the elements seen below.

Next I grouped some of the elements together, such as firstly the large rectangle, with the small circle on top of it and the smaller rectangle above the larger one. To make a camera outline. I then placed this on top of the red tear drop shape and grouped the whole lot together to make a logo. The idea was the tear drop shape is meant to represent a rose petal to go with the name Print Rose Media and the rectangles and smaller circle make up a camera shape to go with media. I had to bring some of the shapes in front of others to get the right look. The finished shape can be seen below.

Next i wanted some text of the company name to go with the logo. So using the text tool I created some simple large text in black of the company name. To personalize this text a bit I selected it all and used to menu option to create outlines from the text. This changes the text into shapes which can then be easily edited. Once I had this option to edit the text individually I ungrouped the text so each letter would be a separate shape. I then changed the colour of three of the letters from black to red, after that  I enlarged two of the letters using constrained transform and placed them in line, so the letter I and letter O combined to make a rose shape. This can be seen below as well as the logo and text combined. 

The original logo looked nice but from my scamps and design brief I wanted to make some variations on this logo to give the client more options to choose from. So creating the same initial shapes as the first logo, made easier by reusable elements, I then gave the rectangles a black stroke to give the shape more of an outline and changed the colouring of the small circle to white instead of red. These elements can be seen below.

I then arranged the shapes as mentioned previously to make a slightly different logo than before. This can be seen below. 

I also wanted to include the company name as text next to this logo. So using the same methods mentioned previously for the text i enlarged two of the letters using constrained transform and then coloured one of the letters the red colour used in the logo. This can be seen below as well as the logo and text together.

I now had two different variations on the logo and the company name text next to it. This can be seen below.

Finally I wanted to see how well the logo worked on one of the most popular formats the business card. So I  looked for the standard UK size of the business card, which was 85x55 mm, and then using the rulers in Illustrator marked out some rectangles in black to that size and tried resizing my logo and text to fit at this size. I tried this with the logo's I have created here and then a few different variations and styles I had a go at. The results can be seen below. On one of them I used text to add a few simple company details and a website. 

I saved the files as ai format  for use on the web and jpeg for use with print. The logos for web use were saved at 72 dpi resolution whereas the ones used for print and presentation were saved at 300 dpi resolution. The lower resolution files are more compressed and can be more easily uploaded and used in web work to take up less bandwidth. Where as the higher resolution files though bigger in size keep all the details and quality for presentation. 

When creating the logo I liked how I managed to try some different variations on my logo to give options. Also I think the colour scheme of the red and the black worked well. I didn't like how i got a bit single minded on an idea and didn't try different company names and styles. Also the logo didn't look too good when I tried to include it on different mediums like my leaflet. If I was to do a logo again i would try to not get too stuck one one idea and try more variation on styles.