Logo Exploration

There are a two major details about my previous logo design that had been bothering me. First, the structure of the A letterforms in the monogram logo and full logo were dissimilar enough that I thought it weakened the branding. I had tried in the past to change the placement of the paint brush in the monogram version, but didn't like it anywhere but where I ended up placing it. The second issue was that due to the overlapping elements, it didn't read as well as I'd like it to in black and white.

Maybe I was leaning into the art theme at the heart of the app, or maybe I'd been reading too much In Progress, a book I'd recently received where lettering artist Jessica Hische walks readers through her process. Whatever the reason, it suddenly felt very important that I see what it would look like if I created a hand-lettered version of the ArtWalk logo. I began as Hische suggests, by drawing guides in my sketchbook and then adding the letterform skeletons. Next, I added the body (building it gradually from the inside out like a sculpture) and stylistic elements. I did this a few times before putting the sketch into Illustrator to vectorize it. Below, you'll see some of that process.

A perk of the sketching phase is that I can work on it anywhere, including outdoors!

A rough sketch in my actual sketchbook, where I began with just the word Art

I imported a photo of my pencil sketch into Procreate where I traced and made some changes to the letterform shapes (for example, the brush is now turned down rather than up). Next, I exported that file and vectorized it in Illustrator.

Another iteration, which I decided not to use

A black and white version of the full logo, which involved a fair amount of bezier handle work in Illustrator

A monogram version, featuring the new pencil A

Full color logo. I missed the 3D paint feel of the original logo and added it to the Walk, as if the paint brush on the T wrote it. I'm also experimenting with adding a gaussian blur to a the logo set at 50% opacity on the bottom layer to add some depth and possibly the feeling that ART has been cut out.

The new logo iterations on top, with the originals below for comparison