“We discussed how this quarter will go down. I have chosen/been assigned a creative brief for Sutherland Creative, which will determine the designs for the next 12 weeks.” -from last week’s blog post

Here are my sketches for the Sutherland Creative logo. Despite my best attempts at brainstorming, I couldn’t find a hook. But, they were very helpful. I combined the ideas of leaf, seeds and punk to come to the idea that a stencil-esque font might be the way to go.

Update 1-28-12:
Due to the snow that ensued last week, I didn’t get any feedback on these sketches until last Wednesday.

Last wednesday was the closest I’ve come to crying during a critique. As Jill asked me more about my ideas for the logo, I realized as I was talking, (I think I said something like “a cross between art nouveau and punk’s stencil style to convey a love for nature and a do-it-yourself attitude), I had no concept. She gave me a stare, that kind of Jill-stare, are you serious? kind of stare. Noting my sketches, they were somewhat lacking in style, concept, etc. She said this isn’t art school. You can’t talk your way through it. She commented that she’d get back to me and I slumped in my chair. (I had to leave before she got back to me, but I could see that there was a disconnect from all the brainstorming I did, all the word lists and thought maps, I was unbelieving that I had gone into that critique with an iota of confidence, that I had in fact looked forward to going to school and hearing the phrase “that’s nice.”

So, I took out my pencil bag and made a series of new logo sketches and subtitled them with one or two words that denoted the concept for which I could better explain my creative choices with the letter shapes.

I told Jill that I wanted to move forward with a design I titled “Hang Loose.” She told me it was risky because it was so graphic and not professional enough, but I thought I could modify it enough, and it fit with the creative brief really well. The document mentions “botanical,” “relaxed,” “friendly” and “script” as traits that the requested logo should have. I thought what better represents that than the “hang loose” Hawaiian mentality. Jill poo-pooed the idea of “Hang Loose” saying that the client didn’t identify with tropical or any Asian aesthetic for that matter. Jill had commented on how cool the trigram integrated with a tree would be, but not for this particular client. This stuff should really be in the creative brief, but I guess that’s the negotiation between Designer and Client that would occur in the real world.  So, we/she modified the pitch of the design to “relaxed botanicals.” After showing it to some of my friends, the phrase “pussy wagon” came up. See link for details. So, I have been struggling to de-psychedelify my logo. I’ve some progress, but I’ll get some tracing paper and computer work done over the weekend.