s a way to get the juices flowing, I’ve decided to throw in a drop cap, as an homage to dailydropcap.com. There’s not much to tell here, but I am excited about how my first drop cap turned out. I’ll be creating different letters as I see fit, but I’ll stick with alpha order.
For my next trick -er- design, I’ll be creating the logo for my business. I’m looking to create something a little bit playful, but still professional. The name of my business is based on the sounds of my last name: Bolduc. Many times, I’ve been asked to explain how to pronounce my last name, and I’ll tell people it sounds like bold duck. I simply exchanged the word bold for intrepid, and the word duck for mallard. This new name, Intrepid Mallard, has a playful feel, but some real purpose as well. I want my logo to exemplify playful and purposeful.
I went through many versions of this concept. Here are some of them:
Ultimately, I feel that none of these have the feel I want while maintaining the right scale, balance, etc. So, I think a font change is necessary. The flying duck needs a solid, grounding, bold font underneath it. With that, the font will still need some character (no pun intended). Perhaps the “M” in Mallard could be made to look like duck feet? With that change, and a few tweaks to the letter spacing and the “I’s” in Intrepid, here’s what I got.
I just found this article through a google search: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/12/22/design-something-every-day/. It’s about designing something every day to improve design skills. I’m ready to take this on!
Along with talking about designing something every day, this piece also talks about recording the designs on a blog, which, as you can see, I’m also taking on. As a wise woman once said, “if you’re going to go whole hog, why stop at the ankles?”
Anyway, for my first design (insert drum roll sound here) I’m going to design a logo for Daily Design! This logo will act as a mascot for my daily designs. Here’s the result:
Yuck! this looks like something out of clipart from 1990! Time to get some better fonts, and rethink this one. It’s just a 20 minute first draft, so it’s time to rework it.
I like the calendar part, but the text itself isn’t working. I’ll have to change the styling and maybe look into some finer typography ideas. Here we go:
That’s much better. It’s not perfect, but then, what is? It communicates the idea of doing a design every day beyond just the text itself, and it looks good too!
