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Design Filter: Logo Process

11 November 2022

Crystal Shore is a vegan sparkling water beverage brand. You can read about the project and see the final design in my Portfolio.

This blog series, Design Filter, is to focus on my design process for a few projects. This includes showing process work like mind maps and thumbnails.

Once I decided on an overall direction for the logo, sketching the logo in a circle helped constrain the proportions and helped me focus on simple, abstract shapes.

The logos are drawn in a 6 x 6 grid. The logos vary from showing a dolphin either swimming, jumping over waves, smiling, or interacting with crystal or sparkle shapes. In some the dolphin looks more cartoony, and in others it is more simplified and semi-realistic.

The strongest examples clearly showed the dolphin silhouette, a wave or ocean element, and a crystal or sparkle shape.

Refining the strongest logo concepts in black and white with a black ink pen and making small variations on them. The three variations were on one of a dolphin jumping over water with a sparkle in the background, one of a dolphin in profile with waves and sparkles above or below it, and the final version of a dolphin arcing down toward a crystal underwater with light or movement arcs coming out of it.

The best logo concepts had good flow and a sense of motion with leading lines. These logo designs also worked well in black and white. Here's a close up of variations on the final concept, which I next took into Illustrator to convert into vector and test in colour.

Variations on the final logo concept included making the arc lines straight and angular, changing the number and arc shape of the light arcs, and different versions of the crystal shape from crystal cluster to sparkle diamond shape.

As you can see, a lot of the actual designing of a logo happens before the logo has entered the computer. That is because it is easier and faster to iterate designs on paper before the finalisation happens on the computer.

If you would like to see the final design please see the Portfolio. If you would like to work with me, feel free to send me a message! 😊

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