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?

Round Two

Alright, so I spent a considerable amount of time not posting anything here, and now that the spring semester has kicked off, I need to pick things back up where I left off. I'm certainly challenging myself this semester by taking Intermediate Graphic Design and Typography at the same time, the very semester that I have to apply to the program and get a portfolio together. The stress has already been piling on, of course, but I'm trying to retain some sort of organization and better manage my time this semester. I'm not sure how it's working out so far.

I was immediately thrown back in the deep end the first day I walked into Intermediate with a poster project, commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr. for the (then) coming holiday. We had a 48-hour turn around on this project, but I think I used my time pretty effectively. The College of Arts & Sciences ended up sharing my poster along with three others. I didn't want to paint MLK as some sort of statue-figure that's dead-and-gone and we should just "honor him" by remembering him. Instead, we should be involved in our city and community and protest against injustice, which there is plenty of still going on. I've personally been attending the Moral Monday protests for medicaid expansion in Georgia. I suggest you check it out and try to get involved. The more people, the better. Georgians in poverty need medicaid coverage and stingy, political motives shouldn't be getting in the way of that. Healthcare is a human right, not a right for only the rich. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked, here's my poster:

If you're just now seeing my blog, feel free to backtrack through some of my posts from last semester and try to get to know me. I'm, also taking Jazz History and Existentialism this semester, which should hopefully find its influence leaking into my design soon enough.

Closing Remarks

Welp, I've wrapped up my first semester at Georgia State and I'm happy to say it went very successfully. This all just makes me so excited for next semester and applying to the BFA program. I'll be keeping this blog as a personal art/design blog for a while. It's not ideal, but Blogger has been a pretty good medium to allow me to post and talk about my work. Speaking of which, here's my final packaging project:

(if you see them, just ignore the typos please, I was in a rush to finish this thing and typing blocks of text was honestly the last thing I was worried about. I'll be creating a new version of this for my portfolio soon)

Packaging

Pack-aging, it's what wolves do, right? They age, in packs? It couldn't possibly be anything graphic design related considering I've had over a week already to work on this project and I've come up empty-handed. I haven't even posted anything here, either. Unfortunately I've spent the majority of this week working, which is good considering for the past month or two, I haven't been getting hours at my job and I'm getting smaller and smaller paychecks. It's bad, however, because I don't have any time to work on what's important. In my free time this past week I've been mostly working on a side project for a student at my old university who is starting her own business. I haven't been able to dedicate enough time to my final project for Intro, so this week is going to be extremely trying (and tiring) for me.

I'm redesigning the packaging for Rotosound's roundwound bass guitar strings (pictured above), some I recently purchased and have been extremely satisfied with. Their design leaves much to be desired, however, relying on generic textures and an outdated logo. After much consideration and trial, I've decided to abandon the hope of creatively using the "old reliable" square-shaped guitar string packaging and I am instead going to be trying something extremely different, a unique hexagonal-shaped packaging. I am redesigning their logo as well.

Oh, and I'm listening to Event of Your Leaving, by Raum to try to keep from panicking about all of this.