freshrnup - Web design Sutherland Shire

Parting the mist to reveal the perfect logo

Good logos seldom come easily. Sometimes you can cut through the fog surrounding the organisation/company name, their activities, their market and all the other considerations which shape the likely content of a logo in an hour or two. However, for me it often takes days of staggering in the mist until, like a sculptor, I peel away the impervious and arrive at the truths which underpin the concepts for the design which naturally follows. Then, it’s the reward of the completed logo that makes the whole struggle worthwhile.

There’s been pages and even entire sites dedicated to describing what makes a good logo and many hit the mark. For me, the recipe is simple. A logo must:

be unique
represent the company’s or organistion’s activities, culture and market
have an element of cleverness which captivates the viewer, creating a memorable representation and reinforcing the uniqueness
work in the horizontal and vertical
be reversible.

A logo might need a number of other features, but it must have the above, or it won’t leave my hard drive. So when a customer from a wetland reconstruction and environmental trust requests a logo which must feature a swan, a certain level of trepidation creeps into my life: How does one depict a swan which wont look like the hundreds of other swan logos that are out there – both sitting on the water and in flight?

After a few days of struggling with various permutations of swans and staggering around in that mist, at 4:00 am on day four, everything began to fall into place: The idea of depicting a swan against reeds in a manner where the reeds comprised the background, with a swan appearing from out of them. It seems obvious, but it always is after the fact and arriving there in a manner which fulfills my above three criteria takes time.

Putting the elements together

The basic swan element

The first job was to bite the bullet and produce a nice, elegant swan which doesn’t look like any other logo image. A simplified shape can look like a number of logos that are already out there.

I opened Adobe Illustrator and soon found myself chucking out many permutations and styles – of floating and flying swans before getting down to the core elegance of the bird in understated simplicity. Creating an elegant and unique neck and head helps to keep the image a little original. It’s placement – in reverse – on the reeds will greatly contribute to the uniqueness.

The background of reeds

The next task was to create a background comprised of reeds, but nothing too detailed – just vertical lines, as detailed reeds would have made the image overly complex and made it difficult to reduce to smaller sizes. It would also have made the image more of an illustration and less of a unique emblem.

The altered density of the lines produces balance between the black and the white but will also give the effect of the swan appearing out of them in the finished logo.

Making it “real”

The problem here is how to make a series of vertical lines unequivocally represent reeds. So far our logo has the swan element and it’s nicely imposed in reverse against the reed background. However, it’s going to take a certain level of smarts to produce the “clever” aspect of the logo which brings the concepts together and creates a memorable image.

The logo so far looked too rigid and geometric, by bending one of the vertical reed elements a reed is immediately suggested, especially in association with the swan. This suggestion is powerful enough to turn the remaining vertical elements into reeds.

A little trimming and the addition of a simple sans serif logotype and the result is a perfect little logo for representing an environmental trust working to preserve one of Australia’s most iconic wetlands.

The logo also works well in reverse . . .