I have so little time to design logos lately, that I have to be picky about which jobs I take on. When my pal, Chuck, said he needed a logo for his super-awesome haunted house project for later this year, I just couldn't say no.
We e-mailed back and forth about ideas. I suggested we take some inspiration from 1970's horror comics. The second great surge of horror comics since the old EC days. I spent the next week or so doing my research while I worked on other projects.
Initially I made a bunch of little pencil sketches on scraps of typing paper. Like this:
Two weeks later, with my little stack of thumbnail sketches, I set to work doing some tighter pencil drawings on 11x17" sketch paper.
I ended up with two pretty decent ideas that COULD be worked into something good, and one other idea that I knew was clearly the strongest right off the bat.
I wanted to do a couple more, but being so busy, I offered to show Chuck the first three in the meantime.
We both came to the conclusion that we had a winner with the first idea and there was no need for more options. (Love it when that happens!)
Sadly, I had to shelve the project for another week while I caught up with more pressing deadlines. Finally, (just this morning) my schedule eased up and I set to work making vector artwork out of my pencil sketch.
I scanned it in and dropped it onto a locked layer in AI CS4, so I could work over it and use it for reference. My first impulse was to create perfectly straight, uniform lines for all the letters. Nice clean right angles and curves -- but that wasn't really in the spirit of the 70's covers. So with my trusty Cintiq, I used the pencil tool in AI to loosely "hand draw" each letter. I corrected the widths and heights of each letter, but left them somewhat imperfect to mimic hand lettering. Besides, the rough look added some spookiness to the over all feel.
I also originally thought I should make the 2 H's thickest legs both on the same sides, but when I tried it, it totally threw off the balance of the logo. Weird. An exception to the rule of uniformity, I guess. So I left well enough alone. The two N's have different curly bits -- so I guess it's a theme!
Here you can see my various passes at building the letters, and the various outlines & clipping masks I used. Looks like a mess, but there's a method to the madness.
When I finally had something decent, I e-mailed the first pass to Chuck. I suggested that the wear-marks were hurting the logos' readability. So the second one shows the logo without them. Chuck suggested we just do the wear-marks on "HAVEN" and see how that looked. Turned out it was perfect. As you can see in #3.
With everything finalized, I did a few different color variations, a grayscale version and a black & white version. You never know what a client will need.
And that, my friends, was a wrap on the HAUNT HAVEN logo!
~N
