Seeing your work in lights
Now I don’t claim to be – and nor will I ever claim to be – a good logo designer. In fact, you could omit the word ‘good’ from that last sentence and it would still be truthful. But I recently ended up doing some logo work as a favour for family.
Some of Manda’s relatives have gone into a business venture together (a Chinese Buffet in Swindon, Wiltshire), and I offered to help by building a web site for them. I knew that they had enough financial outlays, and didn’t want them to get someone else to do it and either be charged too much or get a shoddy product, or both! I knew, also, that it didn’t need to be too involved – just a web site to give people an idea of prices, what’s on the menu, a booking form (Christmas bookings much welcomed!), all fairly simple stuff.
But the original logo designs I saw were not great. The ideas were created in PowerPoint by one of her family and I couldn’t help but think "That really shouldn’t go up out the front of the building", plus there were other considerations like letter headings, menus, flyers etc. Admittedly, these are things that I’d not thought of before, as I’d never had to.
Knowing that that Photoshop is not the best tool for logo design, and acknowledging that it would take me an age to get something half decent together in Illustrator, I ended up using the simple drawing tools in Skitch, a program that’s really only designed as a screen grab tool, with some basic tools for annotation/highlighting etc. But I have found them to be a real joy to use. And so I ended up creating the main logo and other related images entirely in Skitch. The image can output as SVG - it’s all vector-based.
Last week the restaurant opened for business, and I couldn’t believe how good the logo looked in place on the front of the building. The simple black background contrasting with the backlit red and orange was so effective – from a distance, it was clear to see that there was something new at the site, and I really hope that it draws attention to random passers-by, just as it did to me. Naturally, I hope that they are able to make a success of the business and if they do, I can feel happy that I may have contributed in some way towards that goal.
