Children’s Book Covers

Coming into designing the cover I already knew several things; I wanted the cover to look fairly unsuspecting and innocent as well as keeping it simple. All I wanted on the cover was the title, my name and Ollie Owl. Below are a few concepts I came up with:

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These designs were good, however they did not capture my imagination like the final one.

Covers

This is the final cover design. I chose it due to it’s simplicity and some what subtle second meaning – it could be taken that a young child or drug addict wrote the title. Seeing as the book is about drugs, I thought it would be fitting to use this design.

The Final Logo Design

After looking some more at the design I had, I decided that it wasn’t good enough; some people were confused as to what it was, which could have an effect on business if employed. I decided to start from scratch again. Below is a timeline of how I got to the final design.

Logo Progress 2

Numbered 1-12, this is the progress of the logo – 1 being the first design and 12 being the final. I wanted the logo to have a modern, isometric style to the way it was drawn. I chose the design to be in a circle, to give it a warm, friendly feel. At one point,I chose a square to show strength and stability, however, I decided that this wasn’t very relevant to a barbers and I instead used the circle. I swapped to blue and black from brown for two main reasons: to reinforce the friendly feel – and that these two colours helped add to the more modern look and feel I was looking for. The white streak on the beard makes it look brand new.

Logo

Here is the final logo, combined with the logo text. The positioning of each of these two elements in relation to each other may vary – depending on where the logo is being used.

Initial Logo Designs

Designing the logo was tough at first; coming up with a design that is modern, stands out and shows people what the company does in one simple image is tough.

The design I eventually came up stemmed from this image that I saw when browsing online for inspiration:

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More specifically, it was the red and blue isometric style lines that inspired me. I immediately got on Illustrator and started sketching up ideas.

Logo Progression

Above is the design progression of the logo; 1 being the first stage of design, and 8 being the last.

1) This is what I came up at first, as it was a barbers specializing in facial hair, I wanted to base the design off that, and what better way to do that than to do a beard?

2) While I like the first design, it looked off; it didn’t look obviously like a beard, but rather a logo for some kind of IT/game development company. I decided to add a little more depth and connect both sides of the beard and mustache.

3) As it was a barbers, I decided to add some hair on top – this also made it even more obvious that the logo is meant to be a beard.

4) I changed the colour of the top hair to create a slight 3D effect to the logo. I also fiddled around with the positioning a bit.

5) In the the end, I decided to keep the hair in the normal place.

6) I tried adding some glasses to the design to give it more of a face and character. Ultimately, I decided to scrap this, as I wasn’t satisfied with the aesthetics of the glasses.

7) I fiddled around with the proportions of the logo, making it slightly thinner and taller. I also raised the hairline of the logo and the thickness of the joining part of the beard and mustache halves.

8) The final design: I decided to shrink it a bit and made the proportions of the mustache and beard when they cross each other’s paths. It’s a very subtle change, but it really helps with the aesthetic; creating a slight 3D effect on the logo.

Logo Beard

This was the beard design I came up for the logo. However, it is no longer the final designer.

Logo Research

The logo is probably the hardest part of designing a corporate identity; once you have the logo, everything else tends to flow pretty easily once you have the logo, but it’s finding that design that can really stump people, myself included.

Here are some mood boards that I made to inspire me and help me come up with a design:

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 I am looking to have a sleek, modern design for my logo. A lot of companies seem to be going for a “flatter” look when it comes to corporate identity; less shadows, more 2D and using a lot more curves in their logos, etc. As I am aiming to give Le Barbe Magnifique a more trendy and updated look, I will be taking on this style of design for my own work. As you can see above, I have looked at a lot of logos that follow this trend.

I also looked more into the technical aspects of creating a log too; for example, I looked at the shapes that could be used and the kinds of emotions that we associate with them to try and figure out which ones I should use. I noted some of my findings on an InDesign document:

Shapes and Colours

On top of that, I looked at some colours and noted down some key words associated with them:

Shapes and Colours2

Doing this would help with choosing the colour scheme and shapes I would use for designing the logo. It would help with the kind of mental message that I want to send with it; I want the company to seem warm and approachable as well as being competent and seeming like they would do a good job with your hair.

Children’s book: Inspiration

Being inspired for art style was not too hard for this project; as soon as I saw the art of Jon Klassen – I instantly knew I wanted to go for that kind of art style. His work was simple but yet the characters had a certain complexity and elegance to them in the way they were drawn and coloured in. This simplicity often carried a comedic element to the story as well; with their often blank expressions somehow conveying a wide variety of emotions.

Here is a mood board that I developed around the work of Jon Klassen, I will refer to this for inspiration for both story and character design:

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Once I designed my character (see character designs) and decided what my story was going to be about (Ollie Owl accidentally taking drugs and going on a trip), I decided to do some research in that area. Looking at accurate recreations of trips, I decided that it was too boring and that I wanted to exaggerate the look of the trip, so I decided to look at 60s hippie culture style art to get inspired. Here is a mood board that I developed from that research.

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For the part where the trip goes bad, I wanted to use some optical illusions to convey that – the hard it was for the reader to look at it, the better. Here is a mood board that I developed from that research.

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