A logo for me

I wonder if McDonald's felt this way they first saw the Golden Arches?

So I've been mulling making a logo to put in my caps for quite awhile.  I had thought about doing it early on, but dismissed it as ego.  Plus it would just be another design element that I would have to fit into a cap.

But then someone posted one of my caps without any indication that they didn't make it them-self.  I talked about that at the bottom of this post.  Simone suggested I add a watermark to my caps to dissuade people from doing this, or at least make it easier to call out people when they do.  She does this beautifully with her own logo/watermark.

And then more recently Alectra asked me to make up a logo for her, and I did so over here.

So a few days ago, I started to just play around.  I figured that I might get a logo that I'm happy with, but if I didn't, I wasn't pressured to use it.

Now my first thought was to make one similar to Alectra's.  By that, I mean a graphic logo/watermark.  And as a graphic, I can't think of anything more appropriate to use than a mask.  So I started thinking of how to represent a mask, and make sure it is feminine.  Even better, have it be partially masculine, and partially feminine.


To represent both masculine and feminine I figured those little stick figures used on bathroom doors would be kind of fun.  They are a very simple and obvious way to differentiate man and woman.  So I grabbed one from Google Images, and added some masks (humorously enough, the feminine mask is the same one I have in my current header... I didn't do that on purpose, its just a happy accident):

I felt I was on the right track, and tried to add some text to it:

But looking at these, I realized something.  By the time I shrunk this down enough to put in a cap, you would barely be able to make out the text, let alone the whole 'mask' concept.  Plus using multiple colors will work in most caps, but it will almost certainly not work in some other caps (think of a black and white cap).

So I ditched this idea and tried to focus more on a simple mask.  Now getting a mask to look like a mask without a head behind it isn't as easy as you may initially think.  There are so many varieties of masks out there to choose from.

I finally found one that I figured would work.  But I couldn't make it seem feminine enough.  I played with colors, and softening the curves of it, but it wasn't obvious enough that this was a woman's mask.   Then I hit upon the idea... add lips.  There really isn't anything quite as feminine as a woman's lips peeking out from under a mask.

Now understand, this was a work in progress... I was planning on redrawing the image myself, but didn't get that far into it.  Thats why the lines have all the 'jaggy' edges to them:

I was pretty sure that I had just found my logo/watermark.  It's fun, its kinda sexy, it has my name.... now I needed to try it in some caps.  So I loaded up my two most recent caps and plugged it into them, using small variations:

As you can see, I played with having the text, and not having the text, and even played with adding a little bit of color.

At this point I had been playing around for a couple hours, and I know that I can get a bit of tunnel vision.   Thankfully Jennifer was online, and I chatted her up about the idea of a log, and sent these comps to her asking her opinion.

She thought that it was a little to 'fun' and not quite 'sexy' or 'dark' enough.  Looking at it again, I agree with her.  This would fit fine in some of my lighter hearted caps, but it really would stand out in some of my darker ones.  And lets face it, I can get quite dark and twisted.

So while we were talking she sent me the type of mask she was thinking of:

Intially I balked at using something like this.  I wasn't quite sure how it would look as a graphic, and the feather would just feel out of place.  But having nothing else to work with, I gave it a shot.  I simply cut out the background, then roughly erased the father, leaving just the curve of the mask.  I then colored the mask a solid color, and added the lips from my previous work.  Toss the text in following the curve and I came up with this (sadly I didn't save the logo at this point, so I can only show it IN a cap that I saved):

I liked it... but not as much as the previous one.  When I showed it to Jennifer, she suggested having it tilted, as if it was lying on a table top in a 3D space.  So back to Photoshop for a little manipulation and I got this:

Now by this time I have screwed, distorted and screwed with the origninal image a LOT.  Thats why it is so jagged and rough.  But when I saw it in a cap:

Well... I liked it.  I liked it a lot.  I liked it because it was now far more abstract.  Is that a person?  Is it a mask?  Is it just a random shape?

Yes.  Its all of those things.  I went ahead and re drew it in Photoshop, and 'closed' the lips and had this:

I liked it, but was afraid that I may still be getting stuck in that tunnel vision.  So I saved it, and sat on it... until today.

I am now going to start using this as my logo/watermark. I'll be posting the first cap I used it in later today. And eventually I will be using it as a logo here on the blog.