The Identity Project - Roughs

So for many of the roughs, there wasn't that much difficulty in their construction, so I'm not sure how much I can talk about them without waffling on about meaningless details. But I'll do what I can.

Starting with the simple monogram, there wasn't much to it. I found a good serif font and then expanded the forms so I could move them about freely. One adjustment I did was that I thinned the posts of the H, they would have been too thick otherwise. I did have to look around for an "s" that really fit. About halfway through, Adrienne offered the suggestion that it might work better if I tilted the s so it could interact with the h. I wasn't sure how I felt about this but thought I'd give it a shot so I made another design really quick. This went over very well in critique. We came to the conclusion that my other design, while I still like how it looks when I draw it by hand, looked too stuffy for a personal logo when generated on the computer.

The blockfort design didn't really change from what I had in my thumbnail sketches. I struggled a little bit with getting the rectangles to the size I wanted, and moved the internal lines around a lot. After critique we decided that it might work better if I thickened up the lines. I could also try to level the lines in the s with the lines in the H. I couldn't think of any good use of color for it though. I simply have an aversion to color in general. It comes from working in drawing for so long. Whenever I added color to drawings their quality went downhill and they quickly look childish. So I stick to black and white. That's why none of my identity designs use color, as a reference to my drawings, which is my major focus.

The shattered S was a disappointment. It may simply be my treatment of the piece, but it definitely reach the lofty heights Adrienne thought possible. I think it may have worked better if I had use different shapes as opposed to the linear method I used.
Please disregard the phantom s to the right, I must have forgotten to delete it in my AI file. I'm bad about tucking things off into corners on that program.

The chain design turned out much better. I set off the T from the rest of the H by a subtle value difference. Otherwise, it was fairly easy to connect all of the letter forms together. This was one of the favorite during our critique. They thought the connection was good, and that the T was hidden enough it didn't smack them in the face. Suggestions were that the sideway s drew too much attention to the left. A possible solution to this would be flipping it vertical and wrapping it around the T that way. I'm just afraid of that looking a little cliche.

Finally came the silhouette design. I ad my roommate take pictures of me so I could use my own profile, and I think that really made the extra connection. For the font at the bottom I just used Eurostile because I really like the simplicity and straightforwardness of the letterforms. I just traced it with the pen tool and and made the shape of my glasses white. Then I just made me lean up against the H and there it was. This was by far the favorite of everyone during the critique of my work. They thought it captured my personality the best, and they really enjoyed how the silhouette could easily be identified as me. There was the question of how it would look if you could see my arms and legs. Luckily, I had made a test version of that as well. In the end, the all black version worked better because the grey in the other design was too distracting. I'm going to continue with this design, and I don't think I have that many changes to make. Adrienne thinks it would be wise to make the name at the bottom all caps so as to minimize the up and down movement, which would in turn help ground the entire piece. I also needed to pull in the letters with the edge of my shoes. Adrienne also thought it would be interesting to maybe make the figure a different color, but as I mentioned earlier, I prefer to black and white. I'm not saying I won't give it a try, but I'm highly biased.