“Is it a bikini?” “No mom, it’s supposed to be a tiger.”
I decided to create a logo for my site. This first iteration of the site is bare by design. I’m hoping that people focus on the words and examples in the posts, but I wanted to add some other interesting elements. That is where the logo comes in. I guess the meaning of the logo is up for interpretation. For example, my mom first guessed it was a bikini, then a cat, then landed on tiger. I think of it as a tiger.
Tigers were my favorite animal growing up. I just thought they were cool. I collected a bunch of weird tiger stuff: figurines, piggy banks, porcelain plates. I’m not that into tigers any more. Still, if I was to cast a Patronus Charm it would definitely be a tiger. So that’s where I landed and I started to sketch.
I’ll often do sketching on a piece of paper. Other times I like to mess around with geometric shapes in Illustrator and see what I come up with. I chose the computer to sketch out ideas for the logo of this site. First I started with a couple basic shapes for the head. To do this I used a combination of the pen tool and shape builder tool. I find it easier to duplicate half of a path, flip it, and join the paths for symmetrical drawings. It only took a few tries to get the head look the way I wanted. From there I messed around with different triangles and lines until I had something I thought looked cool.
The colors were the most important part of the logo to me. I knew I wanted contrasting colors that I could use throughout the site. Luckily tigers are orange and that pairs well with blue when done right. I went for a highly saturated orange as the base. I knew most of the site would be white and gray so I wanted the logo to pop. The blue is much less saturated. There was a highly saturated blue and orange house in the town I grew up in. Ever since the first time I saw that house I have been extremely careful mixing those two colors together. The result was pleasing to my eye and paired well with the blue I was using for my links.
The logo isn’t the best thing I’ve done, but I like it. It definitely has my illustration style. It’s also easy to manipulate and build on. For example, I created a pen that simulates 3-D:
See the Pen Fake 3d by Ben Joyce (@benjoyce) on CodePen.
I don’t have a use for this particular pen right now, but it made me realize I can use this image for different demos. Perhaps the little tiger has more 3-D or animated adventures in his future. Or perhaps he stays as a link to the homepage.
Let me know what you think! You can find me on Twitter @BenJoyceCT.