Design Insights: The Intern Edition Logo [repost]

August 14, 2010

Note: this is a repost from my previous blog that mysteriously broke. This post was posted on July 19, 2010.

Original Note: This post was originally written as three separate posts on the on the Intern Edition Summer 2009 blog. Seeing as I was the sole writer, I don’t see the problem with reposting it here. I have edited for clarity and grammar. The original posts can be found here, here and here.

Hopefully you’ve seen it by now – the Intern Edition Summer 2009 logo.  It has been seen on this [Intern Edition] blog, and is also featured on our Twitter and Facebook.

As I’ve stated before, this logo didn’t appear out of a void, it took a long process to create, from early concept sketches to rough drafts to final tweaking.   Usually this process is kept hidden – but I am going to reveal some of the logos that weren’t: everything from the rough pencil sketches to nearly final versions that were almost finalized – but then thrown out.

This was a possible contender as the Intern Edition logo for about half an hour before it was soundly rejected by everyone who looked at it (including me).  This mockup was created roughly halfway through the entire design process (about two weeks),  when several other designed had already be proposed, approved, modified, tweaked, tweaked again, and then eventually set aside.

This was meant to be something new and fresh and totally different from the previous versions, which had all been based upon a very similar design.  During this point the editorial and design teams were considering going for a hyper shiny retro-futuristic look for the Intern Edition website.  I think it was described as “Jetsons plus Apple plus 2001: A Space Odyseey plus World of Tomorrow.” Anyway, what was wanted was something shiny and active and dynamic.  I experimented in Photoshop and produced…this.  Eh. It is truly awful.

Frankly, this logo never had a chance.  I didn’t even like it while I was making it.  No one else liked it, and they realized that perhaps a “Jetsons plus Apple plus 2001: A Space Odyseey plus World of Tomorrow” look wasn’t the best direction to go.

After this logo I switched over to using Adobe Illustrator as my primary tool, the best choice I made during the whole process.  Photoshop is great for a lot of things, but it is poor for logo design. I’m definitely starting out with the bottom of the barrel here. The next prototype logo can be considered the grandfather of the final logo.

This version was one of the very early versions that I came up with after a day of brainstorming.  I was drawn to the idea of the IE initials weaving together some way, and I liked the friendly look of the softer lowercase letters.  At this point of the design process, the editorial team intended to go with the NPR colors (as seen in the NPR logo) for the color scheme of the Intern Edition logo and the website.  Therefore, this logo was designed with the same red, blue and black the NPR logo uses.  Soon after this logo was presented the editorial team decided to distance themselves from the NPR color scheme, and instead settled on darker “navy” blue and silver (to celebrate the 10 years of Intern Edition).

Besides the colors, this logo is different in several other ways.  It is simpler in design, featuring none of the additional “highlights” or “shadows” that would eventually be added.  It also is sharper and slightly “fiercer.”  Though the lowercase letters are still friendly, their edges are pointy, the bottom of the “I” juts out from the bottom of the “E”, and the shaft of the “I” is also longer and narrower.  In the final version, all of the sharp edges were very subtly rounded out, and the base of the “I” was removed to keep the rounded bottom of the “E” uninterrupted.

Though it was not the final choice, without this draft version the current Intern Edition logo would never be.

After the first version of the logo was presented, I was asked to modify it to making it “sharper and shinier.”  At this point I was not as experienced with vector graphic design in Adobe Illustrator, so I assumed I could simply “spice up” the logo in Photoshop, which turned out to be a pretty bad idea.

While it is an excellent program for editing and manipulating raster graphics (pixel-based graphics like photographs), Photoshop does not work as well with vector graphics (graphics created using vectors and calculations, allowing them to be scaled infinitely).  The clash is event in this version of the logo.  Everything just appears off…the shine, the shadow, the added “detail” – all wrong.  Eventually I wised up and moved almost entirely to Illustrator, leaving Photoshop for things like editing photos of NPR staff.

You can check out a graphic I created documenting the process of designing the Intern Edition logo here!

Posted in Design Insights, Graphic Design, Internship