One of the first things I like to do when creating a new brand is to create a logo. Something about that makes it an official thing for me. Yes, it’s just a graphic but it’s something that can be shared with others as I talked about the idea to help them get the vision.
I’ve been dabbling in graphic design for a long time so I can get in the weeds of design + redesign + design again. I’ve learned that about myself so I talk to myself and say, “it’s just a logo so just create something and move on to the bigger elements.” Graphic design is fun for me so sometimes a redesign is the result of a creative break from my day job or other things.
For R2, I started with a rainbow vector that was already in Canva. Because I am a bit of a design snob, I knew long-term that I wanted something that I designed myself vs off-the-shelf logo. Yeah, I could have drawn it in Adobe Illustrator but essentially a rainbow is basically the letter U turned upside down. I just had to find a U that I liked as a starting point. This was a job for Photoshop.
Once I picked the letter U I liked – clean, simple – I just had to play around with the ratio of width to height and the arrangement of the colors.
At first, i really liked the ones where the bows were flush up against each other without any whitespace. But when I tested it on the blog page, it just didn’t look right. I liked the white space between the bows better.
Once I settled on that, I decided I didn’t like the progressively thinner bows, especially the yellow one. This meant going back to the starting point and manipulating the upside down U’s to maintain the desired thickness.
Next up was figuring out if I could stylize this rainbow and add some distinction to it.
The challenge with all of these designs was that when I added the text, the vast white space didn’t suite my style. I did try to curve the text but that also didn’t suite my style. In the end, I went with the basic version, for now anyway.
I ended up with multiple versions of text colors that I’ll probably rotate as the mood hits. Since the bow is consistent I don’t think there will be any problems recognizing it.
That’s all for this episode of my #startupchronicles. Next up will probably be tech stuff about building an online home.
