Any Dream Will Do

Again, an enjoyable morning on Wednesday looking at more logos. I wasn’t really prepared to get up and talk about my favourite but enjoyed listening to my fellow peers’ views on their favourite logos. My favourite that I knew a bit about having done some research was ‘amazon’ which is very clever but my utmost favourite is the governments recycling logo. It has everything. (apart from a 1:1 or 2:1 Aspect ratio) It’s green to convey environmentally friendliness, it’s clear and concise, readable font, has a circle to say what it is trying to say, and has a heart to show love. Brilliant example of a simple logo that does what it says on the tin.

I haven’t done any more sketches since Wednesday but a weird thing happened on Thursday night, I designed one in my sleep. When I woke up I remembered the design and wrote it down and it is by far the best so far in my sketchbook. I even dreamt the colour scheme which shoots down the theory that we dream in black and white. I wonder if I can put these 8 hours of sleep down as ‘self study’ or use it as a merit and distinction category for ideas generation. Nah, didn’t think so. I can’t work out whether I have an overactive subconscious doing my work for me or I’m just sad and that I have nothing else to dream about.

I’ve been looking at logos outside, on the web and in magazines for 2 weeks now and find them really interesting, even the crap ones. I think everyone should have a logo just for their own name that conveys their personality.

When it comes to putting my ideas down in a vector format and experimenting further, I fear my only let down is going to be my lack of Freehand knowledge. The timescale doesn’t allow for too much training to create the type of logos that I have seen on my travels. Although my sketches give the basic idea, you can never tell if an idea is going to work until you have tried it with various fonts and shapes. Certain ideas will work with certain fonts, whether the font stretches below the baseline, seeing if all letters can be made the same length, using Capitals or Lowercase. How thin or how thick the font is, if one font should be used or more than 2?

So I am taking my sketchbook to work with me this weekend to try and choose my favourite 4 in between sets and bingo. I can then use Monday to put these ideas into a nice clean, crisp, accurately measured format in time for Wednesday. All the time listening to my chosen CD.

Incidentally if any of you aren’t doing anything on Friday 30^th March and fancy coming along to see what I actually do for a living, I will be performing at the Lupset Hotel on Horbury Road.

Hopefully we will have learned our Wolfram Der Spyra medley by then.