The 4L Boys

Posted on May 26, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Today is the first week on new projects after the Days of the Week series. This week is a piece of lettering based around logo design. The client is a French rock band looking to go pro called The 4L Boys.

The project consists of making a logo that can be used at a variety of sizes and positions, so the final files will include several far less detailed versions for display on social media sites etc. The aim of the logo was to have the 4L as the centre-piece floating in front of a diamond shaped road sign that has been eroded away and become rusty. One of my main focuses for this piece was to create a 3D effect to give the feeling that the elements are all suspended around each other. The 4 and L have a small 3D effect, including on the inlay, and also throw a shadow onto the sign behind them to create an illusion of distance. The group also wanted to have banners surrounding the piece with the words “The” and “Boys” written on them. However, for use in different spaces, there will also be another version with the two words set at a more diagonal position in order to reduce the height and increase the width of the logo, in which case the banners will disappear.

I produced the logo as a lettering piece more as a keepsake for the band to have, as the real process of making the logo in all its variants takes place in a largely digital setting. The digital files will be have more of a focus on simplicity and legibility to accommodate for resizing. That means that the detailing on the ribbons and the hatching for the drop shadow will become cleaner and more regular for scalability. Something esle I had to keep in mind for this piece was for it to function completely in black and white. While the band aim to use colour in certain instances, in many cases the logo will rely on being rendered in black and white, or black and yellow.

Be sure to check out more versions of this piece on the logos page once the digital files are completed, which will be in another week or so.

Seeing as I’m no longer doing a project so predictable as the days of the week, it’s not so easy to know what will be up next week! I do, however, have some other client projects to make progress with, but if they don’t come to fruition by next Monday, my goal is to produce a new logo/banner for myself to replace the hasty version I did for the site during my Thing a Day project several months ago. I’m excited to have several ideas already, and to apply the principles I’ve learnt and the skills I’ve gained since making the last logo. I’m thinking it will be a big improvement, so come and check it out!

Sunday

Posted on May 19, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Days! Weeks! Days of the week! I started off idly sketching the word Monday and had the idea for the series. Well, 7 weeks later and it’s finished. Here’s the last one:

Over the course of the weeks, (or the week,) we’ve had brush style, Gothic, typography, flourishes, graffiti, stippling, even an ambigram. My challenge was to create 7 pieces that were as different from each other as possible. The goal was to expand my horizons, learn how to do new things, and explore styles that weren’t just replicas of what I had done in the past. It was tough finding a style for each piece that set it apart from the others, especially towards the end. With this piece, I had exhausted the styles that I was used to doing, which eventually gave me the idea to make something that looked more like a poster. The main difference is that this piece has a lot more non-lettering elements to it. I could have had it with the word just as it is, but seeing as so many lettering pieces are simply the words sitting stark and bare, I wanted to embrace the challenge of deviation from things that are too familiar.

One of the results of having such a detailed piece is that I under estimated the amount of time it took to complete it, meaning I’m a little late in posting it, as it’s just past midnight. Next week, I have some client projects to get working on, so I will either upload some progress, or finished shots of them, or I will get back to doing some pieces that aren’t just single words, like this series has been. Come back and check it out!

Just in case you missed any of the other Days of the Week, here are the rest:

Friday

Posted on May 5, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Happy Monday! Or as I like to call it, Friday!

I don’t really call Monday Friday, and I do, in fact, have a solid grasp of what day of the week it is. The thing is, however, that this is the 5th instalment of my Days of the Week project, meaning that today’s piece is Friday! This week I was having an interesting time playing around with a new brush pen of mine, which you can see in the picture. I experimented with a lot of different styles and found that it’s a very versatile thing, but it’s also not as easy as it looks. The brush pen is great for a couple of uses. First, it’s much faster at hashing out an idea than it is with a pencil, meaning you can chase the ever elusive image in your mind that bit quicker, hopefully capturing more of its essence as you go. Second, it can be used to fill in block areas of shading much faster. Both of these uses were a great help to me this week, and the piece draws inspiration from brush lettering styles and makes use of the brush pen’s speed at filling in. Unfortunately, however, it seems to me that the ink has a different quality to it than that of the fine liners I use to outline the piece, resulting in a slight difference between the inside and the outlines of the letters. You can’t really see it here in the picture, and it’s only really noticeable upon close examination of the piece in person, but it’s interesting to note.

Another thing to note about the piece is the decoration around the letters. There are several artists that I admire who do similar things, their lettering pieces adorned with much ornamentation in addition to the letters that make up the piece. I had a great time experimenting with that idea last week, and it’s something that I’m going to keep in mind in the future for all pieces, too. The form of the piece is not necessarily bound by the letters that make it up, and as I’m starting to learn more about it, it will be something that I’m going to start to consider more in the planning of each piece.

I’m afraid I didn’t take any progress pictures this time, because with all time I took experimenting with my brush pen, the execution of this piece was left a little bit to the last minute! As I’m sure you can guess, the piece to follow this one will be Saturday, but, as usual, it will be out on Monday next week.

Thursday

Posted on April 28, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Good news! Today I got a dribbble invite! If you don’t know what dribbble is, head over to dribbble.com and take a look! It’s a place for designers to share their work and network with other designers. The other good news is that today (at least for another half an hour or so) is Monday. So here’s the new thing:

That’s because Mondays are going to be update days from now on until the end of ever, meaning you can always come and check on a Monday (well, on Tuesday, really, because I will update in the evening) to see the next piece. This week’s piece is the 4th in the series of the Days of the Week project I’m currently doing. The goal with this piece was to create something with a filigree feeling to it. I liked the idea of doing something in a filigree style, but I also felt that the piece would benefit more from having the letters be clean and clear, which is what made me settle on letter-spaced sans serif all caps. In doing so, I found that I really haven’t ever produced many works using sans serif letters, and I tend to lean towards script and serif. The piece really called for something strong in contrast to the detailed filigree ornamentation behind it, but standard Roman style all caps just weren’t cutting it. The advantage that I ended up with by using this style is that through even stroke width, it not only creates a great juxtaposition of bold shapes over detail, but also helps out greatly with legibility, which is something that would suffer if the thickness of the letters varied more.

I had originally planned to go with slab serif, but, and not to bash slab serif at all, it feels to me that it’s just sans serif pretending to be serif. I’m sure it has its uses, my original choice to use it was just based on my preference for serif over sans serif, when in fact, what the piece really needed was the simplicity of sans serif. Over all, this piece is mainly an exploration of contrasts. The contrast between strength and fragility, between simplicity and complexity, and between black and white.

If you’re interested in the process of making this piece, here are a few progress shots:

Having measured out and sketched in the letters, next is to start planning out the detail behind them.

Fleshing out the detail.

Detail all planned out. From then on, it’s just a story of ink.

See you at the beginning of next week with Friday’s piece.

Meurig Jenkins Logo

Posted on March 25, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been designing a logo that turned into a very big project as it progressed. The logo is for a composer called Meurig Jenkins, specializing in video game composition, but who has fingers in almost every musical pie you can imagine, from brass band to dub step to indie folk and Spanish guitar. Check out his amazing compositional work on his soundcloud, visit his website, or follow him on twitter!

Originally, the idea behind the piece was to have the name as the negative space between swirling, snaking ribbons, but as it progressed, the more I felt that it needed to be something more than the initial sketches. I’ve always known about the beauty of fractals and as soon as I had the idea that the background could be a a design like a fractal, I knew I had to do it. The problem, of course, is that fractals are not only mathematically precise, but they are also infinite. While I would love to know more about fractal generation, I’m no mathematician, and I needed something that was the right shape and density of detail that it would both fit around the logo and be possible to execute in simple black and white. Of course, the end result is not a fractal. but I looked to fractals for inspiration, to try to find shapes and principles that are present in their designs. I went through numerous variations of the shapes and details to give the best effect. Eventually, the design I had settled on included a lot stippling to emulate the gradient-like nature of elements found in many fractals. This wasn’t a problem until the point when it came to vectoring the design. I didn’t want to use computer generated gradients in digitization, because in the end, they give a very different feeling to what you can achieve with stippling. The problem, then is that a vector file including thousands, if not tens of thousands of tiny circles, ends up being enormous. I was lucky that the design has rotational symmetry, meaning that I only had to fill half of it, then duplicate and rotate it by 180 degrees. Even still, there were many times, especially towards the end of the process, when the number of elements on the screen was simply too much for the software, leading to many crashes. Of course, I got into the good habit of saving my work about once a minute.

The final piece:

Here is just the fractal design behind the name:

I wasn’t lying about the stippling! This next one is entirely made of dots. Please don’t try to count them.

The file is made of many layers, and I quite like the look of this layer on its own. There is a row of triangles lining the outline in the centre of the design and extending out towards the edges. Take a look!

The original piece, of course, includes the name, unlike the versions above. However, the reason I vectored the entire fractal, instead of leaving out the parts behind the name, was so that I could do this too:

It’s almost the opposite of the original, with the name containing the design, rather than excluding it. This image, however, has a very different feel to it, I think, but is a useful variation because it fits in a smaller space but retains a glimpse of the details of the original.

Jack Standbridge

Hand Lettering

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