A couple of weeks ago I tossed up a couple of fairly rough sketches for a new sermon series logo which is now complete. Here’s how I went about it:
1. The Big Idea
As a general rule, I am not fantastic at coming up with original ideas (or at least, that’s what I tell myself). This is starting to change (very slowly) but in the meantime, I fall back on my old method: Developing the ideas of others. This series is entitled The Upside-down Kingdom and is based on Matthew 5, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, commonly called The Beatitudes.
2. Brainstorming on Paper
I immediately picked up the upside-down aspect and got a picture of an inverted castle in my head. The previously posted sketches were from a short brainstorming session I had. Here are some more sketches from that:
All of these were done in my xonex notebook which is now about 15 pages away from being full. A lot of different legitimate graphic designers have written that they always start with pencil and paper and I tend to agree with them.
3. Digitizing/Hypnotizing
I scanned it in at work on our Brother multifunction. It does up to 1200dpi which is ridiculous over kill for what I’m doing but I’m pretty sure that’s what I used. Here are a couple results from that:
Those are not the full resolution images, of course. No reason to use up your bandwidth to that degree. I took the scans and dropped them into Inkscape to make nice vector drawings out of them. I basically traced them point to point and then made some adjustments to the curves as required. The N that I ended up with is just the U flipped over. I was working smarter, not harder, it seems.
The neat thing about using a vector graphics program is that I can scale these up to whatever size is necessary. If for whatever reason we felt like doing t-shirts or hats with this on it, I could blow it up hugely without losing any detail. Watch this space Friday for the thrilling conclusion! There will be colour, and gradients, and a sneak peek into the Discarded Ideas file!
special boots that beat the path to my house