An online friend of mine commissioned me to create a logo for his tabletop character. The character in questioned is named Rawkit, a death-defying, gadgeteering superhero that makes money by streaming himself playing videogames and fighting crime. To match their bombastic personality, their logo had to be:
- Colourful / Loud
- Easy to read at small size
- Clearly show the character’s full name (Rawkit Wright)
The first step when making a commissioned design for my clients is to do some rough sketches in pen/pencil, then send them to the client for feedback. I’ve found from my experience that clients are a lot better at saying what they don’t like, so it’s a much more efficient method to let them react to your ideas.
Once we had a concrete idea of what we wanted the logo to look like, I took the sketch into Photoshop and began experimenting with how to make the design look more three-dimensional. I was working under a lump sum payment agreement, so I had some wiggle room to try things out.
Side Note: When I work in Photoshop, I set the Background colour to a grey midtone, to help avoid eye strain. Staring at a bright white screen for a few hours can hurt your eyes!
From there, there were a lot of attempts to create a convincing 3D font affect by tinkering with the proportions of type and trying to give the illusion of viewing it at an angle. Eventually, I found more success by rasterizing the type, so that it could be manipulated with more complex tools, such as warping.
After sending these off to my client and getting approval, the next step was turning this type into a more convincing Rocket shape. For this part I chose to stick to vectors wherever possible, since they are best for creating natural curves, as well as lending themselves to being adjusted easily without otherwise distorting them or lowering their quality. Once the type was suitably rocket-esque I added some extra rockets and a smoke trial to complete the effect of a volley in mid-flight. Unfortunately, I made the logo a little too well. My client wanted the logo to double as promotional material for an E-Sports streamer, and their iconography contains much more garish colours and thicker outlines, in order to be easily recognised at small and large sizes. After one final round of adjusting colours and adding some white highlights, the logo was complete!
My client was very happy with my work, and we have since collaborated on other minor creative endeavours in our collective interests (The Pathfinder illustrations posted here were for the game he was running, and that I was participating in!)
William Crabtree 