I Let Go of My Name and the Results Got Much Better
It’s amazing what can transpire when your canvas and blank and not connected to any broader identity or history.
After spending an entire week trying to form an identity for myself to encapsulate into a logo, I went back to the drawing board and played with a new logo. This time Saturnalia Studios.
The Logo Concept
Saturnalia is an old Roman festival that over time has morphed into Christmas. It’s a celebration that includes role reversals, challenging social mores, general merrymaking, and gift-giving.
Beyond that Saturn has always been my favorite planet in the solar system and I have loved the way it is portrayed in various works of art.
I began by making a series of four icons to play with some general concepts.
While I liked this a lot better than my initial take last week, I was really drawn to my second attempt and wanted to see how I could push it. So I began another series of iterations and over time came up with one that used the same silhouette but also used the “S” in Saturn as a suggestion for the rings.
Furthermore, this was the one attempt that did not completely remind me of a villainous corporate organization that you may see in a science fiction series.
I then iterated playing with capitalization and settled on the name Saturnalia in all caps.
Coloring the Logo
Going into color I knew that I wanted to play with some of the colors I commonly associated with Saturn, lots of yellows and oranges, but sometimes offset by blues.
I began trying to look at Celestial color palettes for inspiration but didn’t see one that I loved. Where I did find one was this palette inspired by jellyfish on Pinterest.
I used the eyedropper tool to create swatches of the colors featured and then proceeded to see what I could do with the planet I created.
I wanted to play with Saturn’s rings to try to play with the figure and ground within the shape. I began by trying to use a gradient but I couldn’t get the gradient to a place where I was happy with it. So I began looking for how to create marble textures.
I found a tutorial that instructed me to use the warp tool on a series of rectangles so I laid them out and began to move my cursor over the rectangles until I got a mix I liked. I then created a pattern and filled my planet with it. I used the red from the palette for the outer ring and switched the text to the navy.
Then for the monochrome, I used the color library tool to pick up a monochromatic color palette using the bright red as a base and proceeded to make an additional marble texture after struggling with the “recolor artwork” tool.
I then repeated the process to get my monochromatic logo.
Branding Sheet with Substrates
I had seen branding rules before so I was more concerned about constructing my mockups with substrates than laying everything out on a letter-sized piece of paper.
When I tried to imagine the future of Saturnalia Studios I thought that it would be a place that would work in print and soft goods. I thought, there would be cards, gift bags, tags for clothing. So I started making mockups in that regard with the full-color version and one with the black and white version which I imagined bying laser cut into a wooden box for a tarot deck.
The fabric came pretty easily without a lot of manipulation, but the wood one since I imagined it being a very deep laser cut, I ended up using a lot of filters. The mug also presented a challenge requiring the use of a perspective warp too, and I am not 100% sure I nailed it but it looked better than when I started.
Source Photo Credits:
Wooden Box Photo by Rumman Amin on Unsplash
Clothing Tag Photo sourced from Freepik
Mug Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash
See the full branding sheet and mockups
Update 3/5/2021:
After the class critique on March 3rd, I received some feedback on my design. I revisited it and decided that to remove the text and let the logomark stand on its own. Here are the four iterations I came up with.
I really liked the middle two options the best. I personally have an aversion to brown because it seems to be the only color that my family knows how to design with so I was leaning towards the blue with a touch of peach.
So I asked a series of friends. One liked the blue version the best, and two said they liked the brown version.
In reality, I’m probably going to need some distance from this project before I can decide if it’s done, but I am happier with the direction it’s going in.
A few more edits I wish to make:
- The PDF version shows some thin white lines that don’t show up in Illustrator. I suspect this is an exporting issue that can be combated if I handle the files differently, but I would need to investigate that further.
- I took a different approach to the marbling this time using the Pathfinder tool’s divide function. I am pretty pleased with the result but want to tweak the anchor points further. This may also be contributing to the tiny white lines.
