- In this movie I'm gonna take you on a brief tour
of the logo development process in its entirety,
from that sketch that I selected in the previous movie
all the way to the final design.
And I'm gonna show you the whole thing, warts and all.
What you're about to see over the next few minutes
took me about eight evenings over the span of a few weeks,
so I logged in a lot of hours.
And you'll see that while some of the ideas are pretty good,
and a final design meets all the brand objectives,
I experimented with some shockingly bad ideas along the way.
Some of the designs that you're about to see
don't work at all, but that's just
how the creative process works.
I've never met anyone who says they sat down
and created the perfect logo right off the bat.
It takes real time and effort,
and you'll have lots of opportunities
to re-evaluate your work, and with any luck
learn from your mistakes.
So here's that sketch that I was so enchanted with,
once again from Danielle Fritz.
And so the first thing I did was to just
basically trace it inside of Illustrator
and I came up with this, and it dawned on me
pretty much right away
that this was not going to work at all.
It's just too complicated, there's too much going on.
And so it's just one of those things
where the sketch ended up looking great
but once you turn it into vectors
the idea starts falling apart.
Now of course I couldn't divorce myself from it immediately,
so I made a couple of other attempts.
I went ahead and added this stroke,
and then I ended up throwing a different color
at the background as well,
but that really didn't help.
So I decided to riff on this sort of
tiered-bar thing that we have going here,
and it occurred to me that the word "fun"
actually literally exists
inside the words Frontiers Unlimited
and so I came up with this guy right here.
And my idea was, gosh what better way
to communicate the magic and the excitement
then to have the word "fun" in the logo.
And I have to tell you that
looking back on it I just cringe at this one,
this is by far the worst idea I had.
It's way too literal, and it's ugly to boot.
But at least I am now sharing with the world
the name of the client, so I do have
some kind of type treatment going.
Next I started to experiment with
integrating the F into the bars like so,
and then I went ahead and raised it up
and created some shadows below the bars,
moved the bar through the F to the top one,
and at this point I was starting
to feel a little bit optimistic.
This seemed like I was more or less on the right track,
the only problem is that it looks like an airline logo,
and it looks like an old-school airline logo to boot.
It doesn't look like the logo for a company
that has never existed before.
So I went ahead and turned the F into a spaceship,
and that of course ruined the F entirely.
It's a cool pin perhaps, but it's a terrible logo.
And this was really the point at which I thought,
"Okay, everyone knows you love this design,
"but now might be a great time to take
"a big step back and try something different,
"and of course, for Heaven's sake,
"simplify this design, it's way too complicated so far."
So I went back to the sketches
and I was reminded how much I like these,
where we're seeing these spaceships
in front of some other element.
Especially this guy right here,
where we have a spaceship in front
of both the moon up above and the earth down below.
Now it's too clever by half, there's no way
this kind of design is gonna survive as a logo,
but it is definitely on the right track.
And then there's this guy right here,
with this fairly realistic silhouette
of what an actual spaceship might look like.
And so what I decided to do was just
to render a silhouette of the Space Shuttle,
just start with something that actually does work,
and then I set it upright and I placed it
against some kind of planetoid here,
and you can see that we have some slight indication
of a fiery jet, a flame, down here
coming out from the bottom of the shuttle.
Next I decided there was no reason to scrupulously
trace the shuttle, that we should work
with our own spaceship design,
something more organic like this.
And now you can see that I have
some sort of poofs of cloud
coming off the bottom as well.
And then I started experimenting with
violating the edge of this circle
by adding another planet,
then I had a couple of Saturns,
which seemed to be awfully darn magical,
and then I went ahead and brought back some text
so that we're spelling out the name of the company,
and of course I'm throwing the crescent moon
against Saturn as well.
And initially I decided this sort of
comic book font might work very nicely
because it has that kind of Disney feel.
Since then of course I've changed my mind,
but initially it seemed like a fun way to go.
And then I went ahead and threw
a couple of Saturns at different angles,
and then I threw the spaceship at an angle instead
and that's when I felt like
the graphical object was really starting to work
but the text, that's not working at all.
And so I went back to the sketches once again
and I came upon this one,
and what I love about this is it's a Humanist treatment,
and it also treats the two words differently.
Now unlike a company like, let's say United Airlines,
I'm never gonna show this logo with just the word United
because the two words work in hand with each other.
Also, of course, there is a Frontier Airlines
so I don't want to step on that.
And it only makes sense, the client's name,
if we have both words, Frontiers Unlimited.
And I wanna emphasize each one of those words independently.
And so I ended up coming up with this type treatment here,
which I like quite a bit but I had to change in the end
for reasons that I'll explain in Chapter Three.
But for now, at this point anyway,
I decided to return my attention to the graphic.
I spread the rings so that we can see into them,
and then I decided to add, remember those stars
on those wires that indicate that kind of firmament?
I decided that might work really nicely with this logo,
and it would convey that notion of the magic
and the prestige, especially of doing something
that's never been done before,
at least by consumers.
But then this nagging message came back to me,
"Keep it simple, stupid!"
and it's really important to come back to this
every once in awhile when you're designing a logo
because it really helps to remind you
that some of this stuff has got to go.
And in addition to getting rid of the stars,
it occurred to me that this silhouette right here
might be misconstrued with these
bumps down here at the bottom.
So just so that doesn't enter any consumers' minds here,
let's just get rid of all of that
and have just a sleek jet of flame
coming out of the spaceship, and nothing more.
Now at this point I was pretty happy
but I decided to tighten up the design
and switch out the font,
again I'll explain why in Chapter Three.
Alright, so this becomes the black and white
version of the font, very structured,
it fulfills all of our goals,
it conveys all the brand objectives.
There's the magic of course,
of seeing the best planet there is, Saturn,
there's the excitement of bursting into space
at 18,000 miles per hour,
there's the prestige of this wonderful company
that you can trust, just from these Humanist letters,
and there's the safety of a tried and true spaceship,
so I think everything that we need is here.
Next I decided to come up with a three-color design,
that is two spot colors and black,
that would be ideal for color printing.
The thing is, I've got this implied Earth
that the spaceship is flying by in the background,
and it bends at the angle that the Earth would of course,
but I think the design works better if it bends
at the angle that Saturn bends, like so,
while at the same time these colors convey the notion
that we're leaving one environment for another.
Now then, let's say that we have
other opportunities for this logo.
It might appear backlit, for example,
or it might appear on a screen,
whether we're talking about a kiosk or a website.
In that case I think we can add some more colors
in the form of these gradients,
and what this allows me to do
is get back that blast down here
in the lower left region of the graphic.
Alright now let's say that you want to go all out.
And think about when you see those soda machines
that have all the branding on the front of them
but it's photorealistic, you see little beads
of sweat on the outside of the cans, and so forth.
And let's say that we want to do
that same kind of thing with our logo.
Well in that case, we'd venture out of Illustrator
into the realm of Photoshop to create an effect
like this one here that actually uses
real images captured by the Hubble Telescope,
at which point I think we've really
got a logo to reckon with.
So in other words, we have an extremely flexible design
that not only works inside of this square,
but also works horizontally as well.
And so we're gonna start things off
by creating that negative spaceship
inside the Saturn graphic
starting in the very next chapter.