Darkspeeds Personal Logos

It's been two amazing months at the school of Graphic Design in Central TAFE. This vocational school is located at the heart of the city and it's bustling with like-minded artists who are talented and studying well at their craft.


I'm very grateful of the lecturers and the students whom I'm working with. They taught me so much about the Graphic Design industry; the importance of Typography, appreciating typography and logotypes, how to draw and design really cool stuff using Illustrator, making professional book covers/magazine styled sheets with Indesign, I'm also learning more about art in a broader sense through my art history class (Art Nouveau, Dada, Modernsim, Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl and lots more!) - can't believe how much I'm learning here!


Anyways I want to tell you that what I'm about to show you is not even part of the curriculum, despite the many assignments I have that's due in this month I decided to give myself a test. I wanted to see what I can produce for myself after 2 months at school.


So I stuck with designing logos that I can use in future to represent the body of my work. Even though I plan to specialise in Illustration and Animation next year in the Academy of Arts in San Francisco I will at least be equipped with some pretty awesome Graphic Design skills learnt from my classes back home in Perth, Western Australia.


Here are the results. It took about half a day to come up with these three designs that utilises the same font which is Agency FB. I wanted to use the same font for consistency since all three logos link to one another. The main logo that will represent me in a nutshell is the first one - why the hand?


Well first off the hand is the second most important tool in getting creative works produced. What's the most important tool? Your brain of course! The other thing to take note is that I draw with my left hand and from experience people tell me that left-handers are intelligent, highly creative and artistic people. I'm certainly not the smartest guy in the family but I do know I can draw. So that's the rationale behind the hand, I draw pretty much everything with my left hand - it's the roots of every drawing that you've seen so far in my lifetime as Darkspeeds online! (An interesting factoid - I actually took a photo of my hand with the Cintiq21UX pen with my camera, loaded it to Paint Tool SAI and inked it by hand. I later traced and expanded the image as a vector in Illustrator).


Okay now the second logo - why commercial? Well because I have the ability to do stuff that's outside the cartoon and comics realm that I'm familiar with. Thanks to what I'm learning right now I can design logos, business stationery (letterheads, business cards and compliment slips), and corporate advertisement images such as posters, commercial pitches and publications. That pen is actually based off my Cintiq21UX tablet pen. The slant on the bottom right corner of the circle suggests the surface that I'm drawing on - whether it b a piece of paper to sketch ideas and thumbnails or the table, or even my Cintiq screen. I chose a warm yellow because it is a colour that represents energy and creativity.


Last but not least the third logo that I've always wanted to conceptualise, develop and create - it's a logo that will highlight my love for cartoon and comic illustration, animation, graphic novels and the print/publishing/book production industry that feature cartoons I grew up with as a kid. If you haven't figured out by now I wanted to incorporate a symbol that would represented my passion for drawing animal cartoon characters (ala Sonic the Hedgehog).


I decided to stick to a design that I'm very familiar with and is one that's personal - that design being the character Ashworth (who will continue to evolve and change over my lifetime). I gave it a slick and edgy design to suggest that 'cool factor' in cartoons. The image is based off Ashworth's head, his scarf and his back - it's as if he's dashing forward ready to take out any threat in his path - he is quite the hunter! I used red to suggest danger, action and excitement, elements that I want to bring into my comics and illustrations in future. The dark shade of grey offsets the attention grabbing reds giving it balance.


So there you have it folks. This is proof that if you got some artistic talent and a strong desire to make a change in your life you can achieve something that you wouldn't have imagined doing so.


I will share with you this important quote that I've learnt and developed myself this new year after deciding that it's time to step up the game, have confidence and go overseas to study, live and work in the illustration/animation/entertainment industry - "Being creative will get you nowhere, until you take initiative".


Oh and I'm only still in the first semester of Graphic Design school... I've got loads more to learn!! And if you think that these logos look pretty decent, man, my classmates - they kick my butt tenfold.