Learning: logo design

Some weeks ago, a friend of mine asked if I could help her with a logo for her new project, and despite me insisting that I am not that type of designer, she would not take no for an answer. A good old challenge never hurt nobody, right?

Paper and Sketch

In true UX fashion, I started off sketching on a paper but quickly resorted to Sketch, because I quickly felt like my pen and paper sketches were far enough from presentable. Ever since I started using Sketch daily, I feel like it is a lot easier and yields far better results to move to my laptop once I have an initial idea.

What you might notice is that these sketches are all too literal: this is also a symptom of working in UX, I think. Much too often I focus on the problem to be solved and go ahead and explore it, which is quite different from the artistic exploration artists and visual designers do, thus failing to produce something that goes far in terms of imagination. But hey, in one of them I did paint a circle (and patted myself on the back when I noticed it.)

Adding colour.

During the last iteration (which happened a couple of days later), I tried to get out of the box and kept sketching in timed slots of 5 minutes, and then take more time to polish. The results are the following, which are, of course, still literal interpretations of the word, but they are a step further into my journey of learning.

Learning, learning

Neither of these ended up being used in an actual project, since they decided to purchase a stock image, but it was an excellent exercise and very different from what I commonly do. Improving my visual design skills has been on the back of my mind for a while and it is refreshing to get out of my comfort zone for a while.