So Chris made these two all pretty-like! It might be cliched, but I’m a huge fan of Helvetica (can’t you tell?), and I plan on using modern fonts in addition to the bug. Evenly spacing the letterforms in the name helps block out the design. Chris threw in some color after looking at the black-and-white and chose a few at random (I’m still looking through PMS swatch-books), the final one will come a bit later. After discussion, I wanted to go with the combined letterforms, keeping a more ‘angular’ look. I wanted the ‘Y’ to stand out a bit, so we talked about differentiating with color.
Chris knows that I’m a huge drooling fan of International Yves Klein Blue (IKB). This will pose some issues as there’s no way to (100%) properly display that color exactly with RGB hex values, but that’s one reason I love it. The color is very interesting, Klein had to create a new color that he felt would best represent his artistic interpretations (he had chosen, early in his career, to represent air and the sky as his elements). It blends a brilliant amount of chemistry, color theory, and amounts to something like super-science in color. Of course, all this means much longer drying times as well as costs surrounding the pigment, but what can you do?
Chris and I are both huge William Gibson fans and having both worked in advertising, can readily identify with the brilliant, eccentric Belgian: Hubertus Bigend. The character owns a suit in IKB simply because the blue makes others uncomfortable.
In addition to exploring color, we discussed the shadow of the letterform (would removing the shadow in favor of a border ruin the effect – making the logo bug too ‘flat’) as well as emphasizing the ‘Y’ shape (through adding color in the branch of the ‘W’ – would it ruin the ‘a-ha!’ of the ‘Y’ or would it harm readability of the ‘W’?) or leaving it the hell alone. Here are those concepts:
I’m still thinking over color choices, I’m looking into swatches of oranges to pair with the IKB. I’ll post the finished product when I finally choose a few colors and then decide on the ‘Y’ shape. I’ll also post my new site personas later on today. I needed to move through those before hitting the wireframes.
