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Official LTX Tech 2.0 Logo Creation Process!
by
, 01-15-2010 at 12:58 AM (13896 Views)
[IMG]http://armorysound.com/finalltx.jpg[/IMG]
Sometimes when creating a new image, design, logo, etc.. It's cool to take some time out of the work and create a little photo album. What I've done is chronicled the start and finish of my process for the new logo for LTX Tech. I started out initially with a rough, very rough sketch. I doodled it out while I was at work, nothing better to do I suppose :p
This article is going to start with my doodle from Monday November 30th, 2009. Hope you guys enjoy!!
[B][U]Monday November 30th, 2009:[/U][/B]
This image is the mock-up, doodle drawing I made. I needed a rough Idea to begin with, and most times, at least for myself, I like to attempt to draw out what I'm going to design.
[IMG]http://armorysound.com/doodle.jpg[/IMG]
So as you can see, this was penned, really quickly. I think I did this in like 1 minute flat. Lol.
I took a picture with my phone, then emailed it to myself so I could open it with photoshop.
[B][U]Tuesday December 1st, 2009[/U][/B]
The night before I didn't do any work on the logo at all. At work, I made another mock-up. I like this one better :)
[IMG]http://armorysound.com/doodle2.jpg[/IMG]
[B][U]Wednesday December 2nd, 2009[/U][/B]
This day, I began working on the actual design of the logo. Basically at this stage, everything is a place holder, plus rough Idea. Here is the image after about 4 hours of work. Mostly pen tool here. The letters are pen tool as well as the needle, orb for the needle, and overall shape to the emblem.
[IMG]http://armorysound.com/ltxwowow3.jpg[/IMG]
The orange colored "High RPM's" were just there as a general idea. I simply had those in place for positioning of the needle.
Later that night, I fought with myself and spoke with Russell, "phantomzer0", about the actual use of the RPM idea. We decided to see the result of not having it. This is the result:
[IMG]http://armorysound.com/notach.jpg[/IMG]
As you can see, it is super plain. It still could have came out amazing at the end, but I decided I really liked the idea of the tach.
This battle between "to-have or not to-have" ended my work for the night. I decided I needed to get some sleep at this point.
[B][U]Thursday December 3rd, 2009[/U][/B]
I got a nice jump on the logo in the morning and afternoon. I got in about an hour and a half in, but it was spread out across the morning. I never sat down for more than 10 minutes at a time. I just had too much to do that day. Here are the results from the morning and afternoon work:
[IMG]http://armorysound.com/ltxwowow2update.jpg[/IMG]
As you can see, I decided to add the tach back in. At this point it is again an ideation. I decided if I was going to follow through with it, I should do it right from start to finish. The first order of business was the gauge surround. The circular part of the steel bezel. At first it was pen tooled very very roughly. I went through and added a circle by the use of the elipse tool. Boom. I also fixed the half circle on the bottom, where the needle is.
I also went ahead and did the final shading of the needle. At this point I was convinced the needle looked great, which it sort of does. Lol.
The circle that holds the needle also received it's final shading during this day's work.
I didn't get a chance that night after work, to work on the logo. I got drafted for some over time and didn't get out till 2am. Normally I wrap up my nights design work around 2. I skipped the design and went to bed.
I take that back, I sat down and made about 2 minutes of changes before I realized I needed sleep. Here is the update from that night:
[IMG]http://armorysound.com/ltxafternoon1.jpg[/IMG]
This update included the final shape of the needle, the T was corrected to have correct proportion and angle, relative to the L. I also added some minor shading to the bezel.
[B][U]Friday December 4th, 2009[/U][/B]
This was a HUGE day in terms of the development of this logo. I started out before work with the beginning of the tach. I decided to finally tackle this and attempt to knock it out before work.
[IMG]http://armorysound.com/ltx10_4_1.jpg[/IMG]
As you can see, the spokes came off looking metallic. I sort of thought it would look cool if it was integrated into the bezel. After much deliberation on it, I decided against it. They just didn't flow with the design.
I didn't touch the logo again till I got home from work around 10. In all actuality when I sat down, I took another look at those spokes and thought I could make them work. Well, an hour later, I just couldn't come up with anything. I tried everything under the sun, but the results were all dismal.
I don't know what I thought to get me to the next stage of this logo. I think I thought about a loading screen from my phone. When you open something or there is a process loading in the Android OS, a little circle rotates. It starts white and slowly has a gradient. so the image just rotates and it looks like its in motion, due to the gradient. I adopted this concept into my logo for the RPM/Tach. I just started with a really bright red, and faded it to BLACK. Black as hell. The stark contrast looked pretty cool, I thought. Then I took the eraser and, with my favorite technique, set that bitch to half opacity, super huge brush size, and soft edges. I took down the opacity of the RPM/Tach with just a few clicks, to make it appear as it the RPM/Tach was integrated into the logo.
After some tweaks to the bezel and newly added RPM/Tach, The logo is finished.
[IMG]http://armorysound.com/finalltx.jpg[/IMG]