Thoughts for: Tuesday 6th March 2007
Goldfish and logo's :: [20:25:56]In preparation for the comic con in 2 weeks I and Joff have been working like buggers, mainly Joff, to get the new comic ready to go off to the printers. One problem I came across while editing our anthology submission for this year was that the original vector version of our logo was only stored in one location, my old PowerBook, which as many will remember was stolen in a burglary last year just before my birthday.
So par for the course I had to create a new logo; now I really liked the old one, it was one of my first attempts at really creating something using vectors, that wasn't a window or door as a background like in our old strips, this is an actual fish, however I think the latest version has turned out very nicely, but I am astonished to find that the design I used has come almost full circle from the first logo I created in CompactDraw about 6 years ago.
So let's take a look, this is that original logo, using a stock fish object that came with CompactDraw, and fairly simple dropshadow effect, I remember getting the idea to have the fish pop up from away the text and did it in a very simple way: I created a copy of the 'B' character and put it over the fish. Maybe my skills haven't moved on much since then, hey? ;)
Later we'd move on to actually making more than 4 strips (but not much more) and even got the crazy idea to do a dead-tree comic book for a convention, at the time I'd finally gotten sick of my Sony Vaio dying and had invested in a nice Apple PowerBook G4, so my old reliable Mediachance tools were no longer of use; I had no choice but to move onto using some tools by a little known company (ah, yeah right) called Adobe, and can I tell you Illustrator is a pain in the arse when you're used to tools with a smaller learning. Despite hiccups I finally managed to get to grips, somewhat, with the tools at hand and I produced this little beauty of bright colours, flat geometric shapes, unioned vectors, and a cute lil' fishy.
You might notice the deviation into using black text highlighted by a bright stroke. Also the I did no manipulation of the 'B' other than inverting it so the larger of the holes came below the text line, but I am for the first time using an actual "fish bowl" in the form of the hole.
Now this leads to today and my spending Sunday night redesigning the logo so that we can use it in the comic, as using a 300 pixel wide
In this first draft you can see I attempted to use the same colour combination as the current logo, however I've been informed this doesn't work very well as because of the text positioning you end up thinking the logo says "old ish owl"; aspersions about the age of my pet owl aside, the main reason for this is the black text with red stroke grabs the attention too much.
The next draft uses the same colour/stroke combination as the main GFB text, and always heightens the text more in line with the rest of the logo. It also uses a dropshadow yet again, and it is here that you can see we've almost come full circle to the original logo design, bold blue letting with a drop shadow, and a pop-out fish (although the fish has of course always been the main theme of the logo).
At last, here it is, the new logo for The Goldfish Bowl. I'm very proud of the way our favourite little fish guy came out in this latest iteration, appearing much cuter and comic-like than past versions. I also decided to add the impression of depth by add an understated ripple effect to the water in 'B', which coincidentally is almost custom designed from the original B of that typeface, in order to fit in the fishbowl effect on the upper hole, as you might notice the lower hole was modified between draft 1 and 2 to be more in line with the upper hole as the modifications to the typeface made it very difficult to make it out as the letter B. The finalised versions has the letters shifted slightly in order to make out the word order more clearly (still attempting to negate the above "old ish owl" effect).
We're still The Goldfish Bowl by the way, however for years we've used the abbrevation GFB to refer to the comic, and I hope this logo goes some way to lining our references up with reality.
