Fantasyland Records: Final Logo Comps

As promised:

Pssst...

Fantasyland Records: Identity Progress Overview

Hello again, everyone. I've been pretty horrible about keeping little progress updates, so here's one giant one. This is due in 8 hours from the time I'm writing this, and I'd like to say that, besides an accidental smudge on my final mounted board, I'm pretty proud of what I've done. I'll post the final logos digitally later, but for now here's a look at what led up to the final rebranding of Fantasyland Records, a new and used record shop in Buckhead:

1. Initial sketches. I caught on to my basic idea pretty early, and also explored a few cheesy ideas along with it. But essentially, it came down to me exploring how I could use the tail of the letter "y" as a tonearm and needle to touch a record in place of the letter "o" in the word "records."

2. A fulfilled outline sketch. I wanted to keep a sleekness to the logo, but also exhibit a hand-done, somewhat "indie music" vibe to the logo. I chose Myriad Pro as my typeface and hand-traced it, along with adding some of my own touches and manually kerning the letters.

3. Many explorations of color and treatment for the original scan of the logo. I wanted to work completely from scanned hand-drawings, and minimize the use of the computer as only a tool for color swapping and minimal editing.

4. A step away from what I was working on, to explore some other type treatment options. I wasn't pleased with where I was going, and ultimately decided to go back and re-define my original and make it stronger.

5. Made the logo tighter and more refined. Custom worked each letter so that corners were slightly more curved and more tightly kerned. Decided to make the word "records" slightly smaller than the word "fantasyland" for visual hierarchy. Made the tail of the "y" shorter and more fitting onto the record. "R" and "D" in "records" modified to fit. Decided to drop the cloud idea as a result of a better embellishment used in the final version.

6. Final pen drawing with record grooves in place. Purposely leaving some space in between the letter fills to appear more sketched when imported into illustrator.

My final logo is a four-layer treatment using two colors I think best represented the feeling I wanted to express in the logo. It uses three color layers as background to a final top layer of black outline. I'll make sure to get it up as soon as possible!

Anatomy

It's Snowpocalypse part 2 and I just finished a project for Typography displaying a typeface and some of its anatomical parts. After toying with a lot of color options, here's what I decided to go with for the final. The progression that runs through the three panels is from "few" to "many," displaying exponential growth, which I think fit well with how geometrical Futura is. The panels are 2x2, then 4x4, then 8x8 respectively.

Spotlight on Futura

Since I was astray today and we just had a few days off due to the inclement "#SNOWPOCALYPSE2014" and whatnot, I figure I better get my crap together and do some blogging. So let's start by addressing one of my favorite typefaces (if it wasn't already evident by some of my previous designs): Futura.

(pictured above: sick example of illustrative use of Futura. Not my design, unfortunately)

Futura was developed by Paul Renner in 1927. It's a geometric sans-serif, meaning it has no embellishments on its letters' ascenders/descenders and what-have-you and is based strictly off of geometric forms, particularly perfectly proportionate circles. And I suppose this is why I love it so much. I'm drawn to geometric shapes. They're so versatile in design and so easy to play with. 

I'll hopefully be presenting it in a way that really captures how mathematically beautiful this font is for my upcoming "Type Anatomy" project in Typography: a 3-panel series that follows a conceptual progression, mine being "few to many/less to more" in a way that illustrates exponential growth.

So, what's your favorite typeface?