The Journey of the Inspire Labs Logo: Chapter One

Adam has been banging on at me to get a logo designed for this blog. So, as proof that this is actually happening, I’m going to record the journey here starting with the initial sketches.

First I thought I’d have a play with the two tittles (the dot above the letter ‘i’) in the word ‘inspire’.

This moved on to a team motif thing, using heads in place of the joining circles. As you can see, I quickly decided that it resembled some sort of crappy crown.

Eventually I decided to leave this direction well alone as I wasn’t happy with how it was looking. The results were a mixture of cheesy and just plain ol’ crummy!

I did however quite like the thought bubble as an idea, so that moved on to the next iteration. I began by plopping it over the letter ‘i’.

I think the top version is the neatest, as the bubbles are contained within the space between the x-height and the cap-height of the text. In the bottom version the thought bubbles look a little tacked on. Granted this is just a sketch, but I don’t really foresee any nice results coming from this solution. So I moved on to playing with the positioning a bit more.

Here I’ve tried moving it above the letter ‘n’ so that the largest bubble sits above the initial ‘I’, serving as a kind of pseudo tittle.

This led me on to the following treatment which would involve a spot logo containing just the ‘I’ and ‘L’ placed next to the text in some way. This solution would look great as a favicon and could potentially work well as a logo.

The next steps will be to consider a colour palette; look at some fonts (there’s no budget for this so I’ll have to rely on what I have!); and to try some of these ideas out in Illustrator. Stay tuned…