Logo Development
Logo development is something I’ve never really done professionally. It’s fun to think about, but I’ve always worked with excellent visual designers and illustrators who know what they’re doing.
I thought it would be a fun challenge to do this myself. Of course, coming up with a solid, polished logo is probably going to take more time out of the process of marketing, building, and developing the app itself, so I can’t dedicate too much time to it.
Here is my line of thinking. Not a pro, just someone who doesn’t have money to hire a real designer.
What’s in a Logo?
A logo or a logotype is the visual representation of the product and brand. It needs to stand the test of time, avoid being “cool” or “trendy” and be able to stand up in any color environment (and generally not rely on color). It should reflect the attitudes of the company, be memorable, and not be overly complex.
Designing a Logotype
Just having a logotype, essentially a typographic logo, is a bare minimum I would need. This is absolutely crucial to getting the app launched, and it doesn’t have to be anything clever or complicated. Think Facebook or twitter. The initial logotype only needs to say “novel monkey” that’s it.
I liked the idea of juxtaposing a bold, solid, confidence-inspiring typeface with something more playful yet literary. Originally, the idea was to have a rounded font like Circular with a typewriter font. Ended up using Google-friendly Poppins and not-Google-friendly American Typewriter as a first idea:
Very basic. Basic letter-spacing and everything. I liked the idea of having a monospaced typewriter font, with stilted lettering because that’s what mine does (even after hours of troubleshooting). I like the idea of smudgy letters.
The cohesive idea is still centered around a more silly ‘monkeys at a typewriter’ idea, but grounds novels as solid, foundational, and serious. The intended effect is something that doesn’t take itself too serious, but is still relatable to the novel world.
The problem of course is that American Typewriter isn’t web friendly, and I’d rather use Google’s swath of free fonts.
Logotype v2
After some searching, I’ve settled on a combination of Poppins and EB Garamond, which although it doesn’t have the typewriter effect I was going for originally, it still has a literature feel. The ‘o’ and the ‘y’ still have a blotted and smudged effect, and the word ‘novel’ still intends to stand in sharp contrast with the word ‘monkey’.
This version gets a bit away from the literal silliness of “monkey at a typewriter,” which I think is appropriate. Juxtaposing a geometric sans with a Garamond-based serif intends to remind of both modern and classical literature.
Logotype v3
With a solid concept decided, letter spacing and letter positioning have been changed up a bit to make the logo more readable and playful. The smudge on the ‘y’ has been ditched in favor of an off-positioned ‘y’ and the ‘o’ has been shifted a bit more for dramatic effect. Furthermore, the weight of ‘novel’ has been increased and the letter spacing around ‘novel’ has been shrunk considerably to stand in contrast with the word ‘monkey.’
The final effect leads the ideas towards ‘novel’ as it’s slightly stronger than ‘monkey’ emphasizing the purpose of the software. ‘monkey’ has been made a little more aloof, emphasizing the playful nature of the original American Typewriter typeface.
Overall, I like the simple treatment, playfulness and easy legibility. I might spend a little time customizing it a bit more later on when I have more time, but it’s definitely good for now.
Designing a Logo
In contrast to a logotype, a logo is more of a luxury. I should definitely not be spending time working on a logo when there are more pressing things that need to be done (ex: launching the app). With that said, the logo is nowhere near done, and I am halting all work I’ve done so far on it. The following asis the thinking and development involved so far
Concept
A sketch came right after the ‘novel monkey’ name came up. A cute, nerdy monkey would make for a fun mascot. I wanted something like MailChimp’s Freddie, except mine would actually speak. Or type. The monkey at the typewriter. The one monkey out of infinite monkeys that was able to type out the full works of Shakespeare. With novel monkey, you wouldn’t need an infinite number of time or monkeys to type out Shakespeare. You would just need Novel monkey.
Sketch Development
As I already knew roughly what I wanted, sketching it out was fairly straightforward. Novel Monkey was already inspired by Mail Chimp, so I just decided to go that way. I wanted to emphasize silly and nerdy, so I gave her (him?) glasses. And hair. But monkeys don’t have hair! Maybe it’s a wig? If you have to ask, yeah there’s a story there.
I’d already known what the image should look in my head, which meant the sketches were all fairly consistently similar.
After having a good idea of what I wanted, I sketched out the concept with a sharpie (right) to create a higher fidelity drawing. Since I don’t have a scanner, this was a iPhone 6S picture.
Reworking the Sketch
At this point, the high fidelity drawing is still a sketch. I need to shape it into something I can edit and change. I also needed it to be vector, which means the logo can be displayed in any sizes.
I brought the image into Photoshop, changed the curve and levels to remove the cyan background (from crappy lighting), turned it into a grayscale image, and sharpened it. I cropped it in Photoshop and selected and erased the white areas with the magic wand and quick selection tools.
I then imported the image into Illustrator.
Creating an Illustration
Ok, this is the hard part and what I admit to I’m pretty unfamiliar with. I know that there are generally two routes I can take from here. I could either use Illustrator’s Live Trace functionality to get a vector version of my cleaned up sketch, or I could actually manually trace over the illustration.
Live Trace Illustration
Live Trace is very easy to use. It’s powerful, almost instantaneous. It’s just… it leaves a lot to be desired. And the resulting vector is littered with thousands of useless points that you have to clean up (regardless of how much you play with noise and tolerance levels). It’s a huge pain. On top of this, your Live Trace takes whatever you feed it quite literally, meaning if you feed it trash, you’ll get trash. It easily picks up on all my crappy line work and shoves it in my face.
Going this route means spending hours deleting points and cleaning up the live trace, for a result that I might not even be that happy about. I went this route as a test (because it’s quick) and with a few minutes of cleaning, and came away with an ok result. It’s a result that works for now. It’s weirdly stilted sideways, and the bottom is a bit too sharp. Oh, and the nose is more of a ‘bear nose’ than a ‘monkey nose’ so oops.
Manual Trace
The alternative to Live trace is basically to grab the pen tool and do it manually. Trace and approximate your lines and make a new drawing. This route requires more skill with the pen tool, but is more flexible and yields better results, because you’re essentially redrawing everything. With this method, you can exactly define the amount of detail you want in the logo, and end up with a better-looking, less complex vector. And you can change the proportions a lot easier (because you’re not wrangling thousands of points)
For someone like me, manually tracing will take a lot more time (since I barely have illustration experience) but is a route I will eventually have to take once the app is launched.
Logo Fidelity, Sizing & Iconography
Now’s a good time to talk about fidelity and sizing. A logo will eventually be displayed at various sizes. Using a format like vector prevents a large logo from looking ugly and pixellated. However, using vector is only half the battle. Here is a resized version of the monkey from above.
Notice that as an image gets smaller, the lines that originally looked good are now blurry. This is because the screen is unable to render the image properly (you’re shrinking more of the picture into the same number of screen pixels), so the image gets anti-aliased to look better, but it will appear blurry. This also happens with all images, including vector images.
When a logo gets much smaller, the finer details get lost, and it becomes a blur. Designers account for this problem by emphasizing outlines, shapes, and contrasts. For Monkey this means emphasizing the glasses, the big smile, the heart shaped nose and chin, and of course, the hair. This is where a custom trace is useful, because you its shapes are easier to change. This is where the logo stops being a logo and starts being an icon—the abstract representation of the logo.
Taking a Step Back
Sometimes it’s good to step back and see if you’re proceeding in the right direction. For me, I need to do some serious research on monkey logos. Strangely enough, I ran across a huge exploration on designing monkey logos. Freddie from MailChimp (which has gone through a few iterations) is a huge inspiration, as well as the traditionally enduring Sock Monkey and Paul Frank’s Julius the Monkey.
I like the fun, silliness and flexibility of MailChimp’s Freddie. Even if he’s looked slightly different, it’s always unquestionably been Freddie. I also like the abstract simplicity of Julius—the eyes and nose are just dots, and the mouth is a big slit. It has a weird menacing creepy factor to me, but I like it for its abstract recognizability. I also like the idea of a simple outline, like Github’s Octocat, which has received tons of different treatments.
Right Now
This is where I currently am, and I’m in a position where it is good enough for now but not good enough for a finished product. Right now, launching a functional app on time for NaNo is much important, so I’m putting these thoughts on ice.
But then again, I could just buy a logo from iStock like Twitter did with its bird. Actually, the designer of both the Twitter bird and Octocat, Simon Oxley, does really good work…
*I call her Monkey because I’m really creative and haven’t given him/her a name yet. I have a few ideas—Marcel, Atwood, but haven’t decided. Naming your kids is hard.
