Hello Everyone!
For this week’s assignment, I worked in Adobe Illustrator to create my logo for Sound + Color, which focuses on a behind-the-scenes look at live entertainment. While I have several years of experience working with Illustrator, I would not say that I have the same level of comfortability with it compared to Adobe Photoshop. This assignment required a lot of extra thought and preparation!
My first challenge with this assignment was how to convey both live sound and lighting in a static vector logo. I am a fan of minimalism, but I didn’t feel like it would apply well here. I wanted something punchy and sharp; a logo that could be bright and flashy like a loud rock show without being gaudy. I spent several days mulling over many design concepts, thinking about the scalability of the logo for future projects. I worked through different layouts, deciding three things:
1. I wanted the logo to be round.
2. I wanted to incorporate elements of an audio graphic equalizer (EQ), and….
3. I wanted to include a spectrum of light to represent stage lighting.
Once I knew what direction I wanted to go in, I needed to locate tutorials and examples that could help me forge the design that started to form in my mind. However, you might be wondering how I came to those design decisions in the first place. My initial thoughts about having a round logo related to possibly making a logo in the shape of a vinyl record. Ultimately, I scrapped that idea because it didn’t incorporate the lighting aspects very well. I instead went with a round shape that simulated a stage light, emitting white light that splits into a prism. That prism element doubles as the sound element, as it is in the shape a rounded audio graphic EQ. The text on the logo represents the “old school vinyl” look I initially wanted to go in, and also functions as a “gobo” on the white “light.”
For reference to those unfamiliar, a gobo is a stencil-like wheel apparatus inside moving lights. If you’ve ever seen a cool pattern being emitted from the stage lighting during a show, you are watching a gobo in action.
Back to tutorials and examples! After scouring YouTube over a couple days, I was fortunate to find a video that covered a very similar design to what I had in mind. There was one catch though…. the video wasn’t in English! Luckily, I was still able to follow it well, and it gave me plenty of information to make the circular graphic EQ that I was thinking of. I’ll include a link to the video at the bottom of the post.
For the technical side of my design process, I started with one line with rounded corners, and duplicated it into several lines equidistant to each other. I then erased sections to simulate EQ sound waves, doubled the section, erased more lines for pattern variance, and saved my selection as a pattern brush. After that, I drew a circle and applied the EQ pattern brush to create the radial EQ design on the outside of the logo. From there, I decided to apply a pastel spectrum of light, then I duplicated that section to apply a gaussian blur and blending modes. This enabled a slight glowing effect to the radial EQ and helped simulate the glow of stage lighting, as if the prism was emanating straight from the white circle “light” portion.
From there, the outside of the logo was complete, but the inner sections were still unfinished. I added the green circles to tie together the EQ graphic and create visual interest, then finally created the white circle, sending it to the back. The last element to add was the text, and I decided to arc the text to mimic the arc of the circle as a throwback to retro vinyl records and the aforementioned gobos. Lastly, I added a prism stroke to the text, tying it back into the shining spectrum in the radial EQ, and exported the logo to the PNG file format so that I could maintain background transparency.
Overall, I was not sure exactly what to expect going through this particular design process, but I am happy with how the logo turned out. I’m looking forward to your input!
Reference link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVPgn5gcEjU
Amy Mirai Dillon 
Hi Amy!
Wow, I’m super impressed with your logo design and the thought and creativity that went into it. I especially like the audio graphic equalizer effect – you definitely succeeded in bringing that to life and it is a perfect representation of the logo title. I also really like the pastel take on this as opposed to the bright colors you usually see in audio graphic equalizers.
I really think this logo is great as-is, but some options to think about if you wanted to make any changes:
Because there are a lot of pastel colors in the logo, maybe a darker stroke around certain portions could create a little more contrast. The colors and visual effects definitely make the logo lively, but I think some areas could pop a bit more.
I think your font matches really well with the color scheme, it has a “groovy” feel if that makes sense. But it might be fun to experiment with more font styles.
Thanks,
Sarah
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Hi Amy,
Wow what a great logo! This is very impressive for a draft, and I can really see how your thought process went into your final design. I love the equalizer effect it is so neat! I also really enjoy your color choices on the logo as it really pops well, and provides such a interesting viewing experience. I think my only thing I could offer in regards to change would be the border around the wording could benefit from more contrast, but like Sarah said it is really, really impressive, and a great inspiration to me for my final draft, as I was very simplistic in my initial design wanting to get lots of feedback before locking things in. Awesome job, and I look forward to seeing what your final design looks like!
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Hi Amy!
Wow, I love your logo! I think it looks great so far. I appreciated the thorough explanation you gave of the inspiration behind each of the elements and how they all came together. I think what you came up with is an excellent representation of EQ, spectrum of light, and vinyl records. There’s not much I would change honestly, but one thing to consider could be creating more contrast between the font and the white circle background. I love the font you chose and think the prism stroke looks awesome but it was a bit hard to see the outline of the letters at first glance. I wonder if you could increase the thickness of the stroke or the font in general to fill up a bit more of the space and make it easier to see? Also, in the lines coming out from the circle, I noticed there appears to be two lines almost overlapping each other in three different spots. Was that intentional? I only ask because in your post you mentioned you spaced out all the lines equally. Overall, great job!!
Thanks,
Elizabeth
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Wow, I received a lot of great feedback for my logo! Thank you everyone.
I was surprised by the overwhelmingly positive response to my design, and people suggested far less revisions than I expected. Going forward, I would like to fix the radial EQ portion so that there are no overlapping sections – in the initial draft, I did my best to make the sections equidistant, but there are still some portions that cross over each other. The only universal suggestion I received was to darken the font or font stroke, which I was also contemplating during the initial logo creation process.
I anticipate that I will be making the aforementioned adjustments before submitting my final draft. I’m still debating changing the text design entirely, but I will need some time to think about it. Overall, I’m still very happy with how this logo turned out and I doubt that I will make any drastic alterations.
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