Every year, Southeast Technical College hosts a portfolio show for the media communication majors to strut their stuff in front of potential employers. Every year, the graphic designers each design their own identity for the show and vote on which will be used.
We’ll be looking more in-depth at the logo I designed and the inspirations I drew from.
When we first started this project, we reviewed past Portfolio Show winners. Almost all of them had clean, straight-cut designs reminiscent of “corporate” design ethos. This is generally not an issue, but after seeing almost all the past winners have the same-ish look, I knew I wanted to do something different.
From the get-go, I started experimenting with hand-drawn typefaces. I used a water-based paint pen to get the thick lines I was looking for. I made sure to use the side that had little parts sticking out from the brush to get uneven stroke widths and little artifacts. I also held the brush at awkward angles to get more of a wonky look.
To get even more uneven results, when drawing out the words, I would scramble the order of the letters so as not get used to the flow.
Inspiration
For inspiration, I used one of my favorite tools: The Brand Identity website. I searched for projects with similar goals/visuals to help get the creative juices flowing. Here are 2 that helped me.
I took my favorite-looking letters into Illustrator and image-traced them. Then I started to experiment with textures by using different-width profiles and brushes. I ultimately decided against using a stroke since the look of the letters interconnected through color was more pleasing to the eyes. Also, to be able to make them a teeny bit more uniform, I used the Roughen effect in Illustrator (Effect>Distort & Transform> Roughen). I really tried hard and messed with the sliders a lot to achieve a slightly uniform, but still hand-drawn and organic texture to the edges of the letters.
Since this was the 25th anniversary of the show, I wanted to highlight that in the logo. I played a lot with the way the numbers fit together and how they are almost inverted forms of themselves. Using the geometrics of the numbers, it was simple to know how they could fit into each other, but the hard part was getting it to look right.
I wanted it to have nice curves and flow nicely and evenly to have good contrast with the hand-drawn letters. This is also why I chose the font Neue Haas Grotesk Display Pro; it had nice curves and clean edges that were still welcoming and playful.
To play off of these nice curves, I aligned the “TH” and “ANNIVERSARY” to the elongated bottom of the 5. This gave us some very nice motion.
All of these design choices culminated in the finished logo. I used colors from the official STC branding guide, but also created 2 others: one in black and another in an off-white for contrast when needed.