The 4L Boys

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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 4L Boys 2

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

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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:

Sunday2

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:

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

 

 

Monday

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It’s Monday! Or at least, yesterday was Monday. In celebration of this fact, here’s something I finished on Sunday!

Monday

I posted it over at reddit a couple of days ago, and it got a good response, but I’ve only just had the time to make a blog post about it. So, what’s the deal? Well, I’m thinking of starting a series called Days of the Week. I’m sure you can guess what will be featured. I’m planning on doing a different style for each one. The goal of the project could be that each piece should be as different from the others as possible. We will have to see how diverse I can make their styles. Striving for diversity is a great way to expand your skills and your portfolio, so it’s a win-win situation!

I think that many people could be afraid that they will produce terrible work, so they never try. People often ask me how I learnt to do things like this, and the answer is really just that I started doing it. I saw that others had done lettering pieces and posted them to the Internet, and I wanted to try too. Practically everything I’ve ever lettered is posted here on the website, and if you take a look through my portfolio, I’m sure you can see how things have progressed. Some of the earlier pieces aren’t so great, and I’ve learnt a lot since then, but I think it’s worth leaving them up there because it’s an honest reminder of where I came from. I think it’s worth being honest about something like that. They are the beginning of a journey that I’m taking, a journey that hopefully has no end. To come to the end would mean that there is nothing left to learn, and no improvement to make, and I’m sure if anyone thinks they are in a place like that, then they are missing something. So, I’m looking forward to finding out where this project will take me!

This project might be punctuated with other pieces, so it might take a while before I have the full-week set uploaded, but stay tuned to see what the rest turn out like!

Here’s a vectored version. I tightened up a couple of lines here and there, but overall, it’s pretty much the same as the inked one above. The main difference is that in digitisation, I have the opportunity to use gradients, so where I used hatching on the sides of the letters to shade them in the inked version, I had a play around with using gradients to achieve a similar effect.

Monday