The Evolution of a Logo

With the first post of my return, I thought I'd go through some recent work I did for a friend.  Her and her husband are starting out as photographers and wanted help setting up their blog on Squarespace (which I have to say is a pretty awesome service).  I wanted to show step by step the evolution of the design process.

The first thing we started with was the color palette.  We discussed a couple options in the same family but locked onto the following one before we started anything.

Design Seeds is a really cool website that helps you pick color palettes.  There are hundreds of palettes, from 5 to 7 colors, and I think it's a great way to start guiding a design.  Squarespace is a really great service for bloggers without code experience: it's more customizable than Blogger, but if you don't want to code at all, you don't have to (unlike Wordpress).  Someday I just may have to switch over!

We started out by choosing what colors we wanted prominent in the design.  The coral was chosen for the major titles, blue for accent headings and elements, mustard for links, and the peach for the background.   The gray was also used for some accent elements.



I wanted to create two logo-like elements: a banner as well as a small ball for watermarking.  We started with the banner.  In the first iteration we decided on the color scheme, as seen below.

The colors work great together, but there just seemed to be something missing.  The font used for the block type seemed like a magazine, and too stark.  Next we went the opposite direction, making everything very soft.

 This logo is not strong enough, and didn't have the contrast that we wanted.  Finally, we came up with what would eventually be the banner of the site.

Because "Make My Day" doesn't automatically make you think about photography, we added an accent for the page banner.

As we were working on the final  banner, we also started looking at small logos for watermarking pictures.  The first iteration of this (with the wrong colors) was generic and uninteresting.

After adding in the right colors and changing the font out, we were definitely a lot closer.  Because the name includes "Day," I wanted to try something fun to make it stand out a bit, so I switched some colors around and turned it into a sun.

The palette really does do wonders!  We decided the sun was a great choice, but also loved the look of the text all together.  We wound up combining the two.

I love the sun, but the blue seemed washed out.  After working with the accent colors, we went with this logo for watermarking.

 

I'm very happy with it!  It captures the basics of the name without being too intrusive and will easily translate to black and white for edited pictures.  So now, Make My Day Photography has a cool site to go with Ryan and Aly's excellent photos.  Be sure to check out the full site (and their growing portfolio) at www.makemydayphoto.com.

Got any questions or suggestions?  Leave your thoughts in the comments!