In critique today, I realized my logo was dead. It had no life, no spark of inspiration to carry me through developing all the necessary accessories, the business card and the letterhead. I mean, who uses Times New Roman as a logo font, anyways! As I told Jill and my small critique group, the logo had undergone so many revisions before it wasn’t what I liked about the concept in the first place. But, mostly I sobbed listing off the things I didn’t like about it: composition, color, font choice, position, scale, hierarchy… I think I said every new design vocab word we’ve had to learn so far. I loved what Ryan, another classmate did. He said “Hey Jill,” with one of those apologetic grins, before  presenting a new moodboard and a new logo with a business card layout and all. That’s proactive. I should have done that, instead of going into that meeting with a half-baked and yet fully rotten, live-traced ick fest.

So after that, I worked the rest of the class on a new logo, first starting somewhere kind of random, yet related to the project (a brainstorm tip!). I turned to Avatar for inspiration. There’s a scene when the blue cats are by a life-tree and it’s spewing dandelion-esque spores. So I looked for a font to match that feeling, then traced over it when a pen tool in Illustrator, reworked the spacing. I tried to incorporate a fern-esque alien spore thing, but it didn’t work out. As I was going out to lunch, I was thinking, scratch that, but I love that loopy “d”. I thought, man, when I get back to the classroom, I’m going to find out what it can do for me. I looked at it and I started to see something familiar in its shape. So, I knocked it on its side and, ah. Landscape design, indeed. I’m not sure about the Helvetica Light text I added at the bottom. This company as an exceptionally long name.

One of my teachers said that art school students throw out their ideas rather than try to fix what’s not working with their project, but designers are problem solvers and see ways to salvage defective designs. I think that as a creative, you shouldn’t be afraid to start over because at the end of the day, your inspiration fuels your work and new starts create energy.