A couple of weeks ago I tossed up a couple of fairly rough sketches for a new sermon series logo which is now complete. Here’s how I went about it:
1. The Big Idea
As a general rule, I am not fantastic at coming up with original ideas (or at least, that’s what I tell myself). This is starting to change (very slowly) but in the meantime, I fall back on my old method: Developing the ideas of others. This series is entitled The Upside-down Kingdom and is based on Matthew 5, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, commonly called The Beatitudes.
2. Brainstorming on Paper
I immediately picked up the upside-down aspect and got a picture of an inverted castle in my head. The previously posted sketches were from a short brainstorming session I had. Here are some more sketches from that:
the one at the bottom right has previously been posted
not sure how trogdor got in there.
trying out some different ideas for text
sepia is so much fun to use in designing
All of these were done in my xonex notebook which is now about 15 pages away from being full. A lot of different legitimate graphic designers have written that they always start with pencil and paper and I tend to agree with them.
3. Digitizing/Hypnotizing
I scanned it in at work on our Brother multifunction. It does up to 1200dpi which is ridiculous over kill for what I’m doing but I’m pretty sure that’s what I used. Here are a couple results from that:
hey look a castle
see what i did there with the arrows?
Those are not the full resolution images, of course. No reason to use up your bandwidth to that degree. I took the scans and dropped them into Inkscape to make nice vector drawings out of them. I basically traced them point to point and then made some adjustments to the curves as required. The N that I ended up with is just the U flipped over. I was working smarter, not harder, it seems.
looks surprisingly like what I drew
vectorized
The neat thing about using a vector graphics program is that I can scale these up to whatever size is necessary. If for whatever reason we felt like doing t-shirts or hats with this on it, I could blow it up hugely without losing any detail. Watch this space Friday for the thrilling conclusion! There will be colour, and gradients, and a sneak peek into the Discarded Ideas file!
special boots that beat the path to my house