Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Amber Ocean

This is the 4th out of 5 imprint logos for TM Publishing called Amber Ocean. This logo is for children's books so when I was researching I looked up the top 10 logos for kids and they were very colorful, playful, sometimes hand-drawn and just plain fun. 

After researching those logos, I searched to see what logos were out there already with wave or ocean theme. Below are the top three that I was influenced by. 




Again, I had to be literal about the ocean, but I noticed that the waves resemble book pages in a way. Below are my sketches I came up with. A, B, and D are pretty literal waves, while C, E, and F resemble pages in a book turning.
My client liked D the best and one the first round (a miracle) he liked it. All I had to do was tweak some more to refine the smooth edges and I was finished.




Friday, August 3, 2012

Burgundy Grove

Burgundy Grove is my 3rd out of 5 logos I am working on for TM Publishing. This branch is the Literary and Contemporary genre. (Emily Dickinson to the new American Dervish novel) My client wanted a pretty literal representation of their imprint brand.

In my sketch phase I wanted to have a visual metaphor of poetry represented in the trees. I wanted the trunk to be fluid and elegant. I also played with the style of leaves including blocked shape, variety in line width and individual leaves. I presented the following sketches to my client.


The client liked the 2nd one down on the left the best, because the trees where becoming one, he also likes the leaves on the top right tree and finally the trunk on the 2nd down to the right. I went back to the sketch book and came up with the following drawing (one of many) and my client liked it.


I then brought the following drawings into the computer and cleaned them up in Illustrator.


In all of these trees I wanted to portray grace and elegance as well as exploring different leafy top options. My client liked "A" the best and I refined the symbol further and added color. From my previous comp I fixed the line width of the trees leaves to flow better. I also condensed the trunks to become more of a solid shape as well as thickening the braches so you can see it when printed small on a book spine.