Logo Design 101

Here's a logo I recently finished designing for a new client. The You Gotta Sing! Chorus is an inclusive, adult choir whose mission statement is "Singing is our birthright." I thought I'd show you the process we went through to arrive at this — a sort of behind-the-scenes look, for those who might be interested.

When I first met with the choir's founder and director, Vanessa, she told me all about the philosophy behind it. She loves showing adults that they can not only sing in harmony, despite what they may have been told all their life, but do an excellent job of it, to boot. She thought she'd probably want a brightly coloured logo, possibly using the full spectrum, to represent the diversity of members welcomed. She also mentioned that she often abbreviates the name of the choir YGS, so it might be good to incorporate that as part of the logo. Finally, she suggested the possibilities of using a harp or butterfly icon, as she's a harpist and thinks of the choir as allowing people to come out of their shells and spread their wings.

I came home with the notes: "Bright colours. Playful, but adult. Inner child balanced with expectations of quality. Harp? Butterfly?" Then I sat down and made these very rough sketches:


I usually like to have three distinct concepts to show the client in the first stage, with variations on each. The three main ideas here were a plain wordmark (i.e. no icon) in a somewhat fun, serif typeface; a harp icon used as the letter 'Y' in the choir name; and a butterfly icon made of the letters in the choir's acronym.

Working from those three ideas, you can see here the progression of playing around I did in Adobe Illustrator to try and come up with some variations worthy of showing to Vanessa as an initial proof (clicking for full size highly recommended):


I picked two or three versions that I liked within each concept, and sent them to her. (Note: I'd seen a Woody Allen film the night before (Summer in Paris — don't bother), which is where the typeface in the first butterfly one came from. I got obsessed with finding out what that font was that he always uses, and once I had (Windsor Condensed Light), I had to use it somewhere. Sometimes mindset overrides appropriateness. But I guess that's what multiple drafts are for.)


By the way, these are all black at this stage because I always work in black first, to get the shape sorted out, and then turn to colours at the end. Logos always require an all-black version anyway, which can sometimes be tricky to create if you start with a full-colour version. This way, we get to concentrate on one thing at a time without distraction, and the shape is sure to be striking even in a monochromatic format. Music recording engineers often do their mixing in mono before panning instruments left and right, for analogous reasons.

I was concerned that the harp logos were going to stand out as the best executed, even though in my mind the harp was not such a great idea for an icon. Vanessa happens to be a harpist, but she doesn't actually play a harp when directing the choir, so it doesn't really say anything about the group. On the other hand, I thought the YGS butterfly had real potential conceptually, but was worried that my initial crack at it was so rudimentary it would scare the client off. But I didn't want to spend any more time than I already had on it for the first draft.

Luckily, Vanessa was thinking along the same lines as me and chose the butterfly direction. She wanted to see a rounder typeface than the Woody Allen one, with the word "Chorus" in all caps and less difference in heights of letters, so that the two halves of the circle would appear more even. She also thought the butterfly could be leaning less.

I agreed with all of these points, so I got to work on fixing up the butterfly. The letters making it up needed more width variation, I could see, to make it more elegant and professional looking. I did up some sketches to work from...



... and then a bunch more Illustrator work to get it looking just how I wanted. Now that I had a better sense of direction, I didn't mind spending a decent chunk of time on it. I chose five different typefaces that seemed to suit the character of the new icon, and sent Vanessa another proof:


She liked the ones on the left and in the middle best. Concerns for this round were that the antennae/Y-branches should be less droopy and more open, and that it was veering too far in a youthful or feminine direction. Vanessa wondered if I could come up with some ways of making it more appealing to adult men and women, while still being fun and welcoming.

I thought this was some really good direction — she was exactly right. The whole thing was now so whimsical, it could be an elementary school logo. I fixed the droopy antennae and got rid of the outline around the butterfly. I'd thought it necessary to define the 'G' and 'S' as a wing shape, but found that with a bit of tweaking I could make the shape stand out as a butterfly just as well, but with a much more refined (and simpler!) shape.

But now the typefaces she'd chosen were both striking me as fighting against the new, sophisticated shape, so I tried lighter, more elegant weights of those two and gave her a third choice in addition. It wasn't so "round," as she'd originally asked for, but I defended it by saying that it was more adult/masculine, while still being modern and a little playful, and that it toned down the loose, curvy quality of the butterfly icon with a certain no-nonsense character:


Vanessa agreed! So now we just needed to work on colour. I tried a bunch of polychromatic, rainbow possibilities, but no matter what I did, the logo kept ending up looking like something for kids again. I decided to scrap that idea and just try to choose some bright colours that would be different enough from standard primaries/secondaries to give them some adult appeal. You probably wouldn't have recognized this, but the bottom right colour scheme here is stolen from the old Mille Bornes French card game, which I always loved the look of. Notice that there's a butterfly image and a snail with YGS-like antennae on those cards — I think those facts might have subliminally influenced me to use those colours here. Funny how visual memory works.


Anyway, Vanessa surprised me by choosing the bottom left one, which I'd thrown in only because I thought it looked quite nice in its simplicity, even though it didn't really match the brief in terms of being diversely colourful. Sometimes you just have to let go of your initial concept, and I'm glad this was one of those times. I like the butterfly wing being all one colour for easier image identification, and I was very happy to get some black in there for a whiff of sophistication. Thanks, Vanessa, for having such good taste and being such an easy client to work with!