The Journey of the Inspire Labs Logo: Chapter Two

In my last post, we looked at some initial sketches. Sketching is an important first step in any design as it allows for rapid creation and evolution of ideas. It also allows the rejection of any bad ideas before any time is invested producing mock-ups in Illustrator, Photoshop et al.

I’ve since taken the most promising of the initial ideas and produced some quick mock-ups in Illustrator. It’s worth mentioning that I’m yet to have a proper look at colours and fonts — that’s for the next stage and for now I’ve just used a nice blue. Anyway, the eye-candy ….

The “thought bubbles” and the “labs” balance this logo out quite nicely. I’ll probably put a little more work into this one as I think it could look really good with some refinement and a decent typeface.

Myriad Pro Condensed & Semibold (top). Quadranta Bold & Myriad Pro Semibold (bottom).

The “spot” logo hasn’t come out as well as I thought it might. It reminds me of cheese, and there are spacing issues. As the logo gets smaller (and it will on the web) it begins to get rather cluttered. With some work towards spacing it all out this could be improved, but I don’t think it’ll ever look brilliant. Besides, that letter “l” looks like a lower-case “i”. Rubbish!

However, Museo Sans is looking pretty sexy!

Museo Sans 500, ladies & gentlemen.

I developed the idea of using the initials a little further, removing the spot and joining the letters up in a nice “swishy” ligature style.

I was quite enamoured with this one and took it straight into Illustrator …!

I've used Helvetica Neue Roman for the text.

There’s some messy vector work right there, but it’s only a mock-up. Nevertheless, I think it’s starting to look like a believable logo. It has some nice symmetry, it’s balanced, a little tall maybe but this is definitely going to the next stage. With the right colours, a smart font and some wizardry with the pen tool; we might have ourselves a logo ….