Raven came to me after the successful 2021 disc golf season. He was in need of a logo to represent himself on tour and have the logo represented on his soon to be need van wrap that was to be produced in-house by MVP’s marketing team. The obvious design decision was to use a “Raven” to create an iconic symbol reflecting his transformation in both maturity and disc golf game. Before that, we had collaborated on his second tour series discs so knowing Raven a little bit through past experience; prepped me before taking on this project.
How many different ways can you represent a raven? I don’t think I reached every one but I certainly tried. You want to reach, try, experiment, and fail. That’s the point of these thumbnail sheets. Move things around quickly. Copy/ Paste and tweak some more. Push an idea until you’re sick of it. Why are you sick of it? Does it have lasting appeal? Move on to then come back again. These are all things going through my head when doing them. Maybe a combination of a few of these ideas will click with yourself and the client.
I make mental notes on sheets if I can’t get on a facetime/ call. Making arrows, anecdotes, and small mental notes of what I was thinking. I understand the symbol speaks itself but some people like to understand the “How” and “Why”. What about these appeals to the designer and why out of all the thumbnails, did we choose this one to present?
Raven was extremely happy with the end result. Quickly turning around clothing with his new apparel sponsor. A vehicle wrap came a few months later with the aid of Michael Ramanauskas. I outfitted Raven with a quick usage guide so he could send to outside vendors for self promotion. Excited to see him out on tour representing MVP Disc Sports and getting to the top of the leaderboard. Raven’s a great person and I respect him a ton. Thanks for stopping by.
Basket Bashers- Rebranding
Wow! What a journey. I remember not too long ago I was doing some freelancing work for Jerry Pectol (previous owner of Basket Bashers Disc Golf) when I went to full time. Since then, Jerry had recently decided to hang it up. Good local friends, Logan & Stacy acquired the Basket Bashers company and approached me to create their new logo to revive the brand. Initial talks led down a path of doing something more with an illustrative tone. Letting the highly, eye-catching artwork attract people into wanting to wear it on various merchandise. We went through a few ideas and pushed and pulled to what we thought a logo should be.
The common direction was initiated by Stacy and it really got this project headed toward the finish line. It was a rough napkin sketch but it revitalized everyone. That initial image is located in the far upper left of the reference sheet. I used that as a stepping stone and put together 3 ideas of what it could be. These felt really good and I knew any one of them would’ve transitioned well into final form. Another design requirement lead me to continually test this design as a full-sized stamp in MVP’s stamping template. Those parameters were constantly reminding us of what we could and could not do as far as logo layout.
After a few rough passes, it was safe to start bringing the idea into vector form. In closing, I can’t stress how important a company logo is. To be able to educate while working through these passes; we ended up in a really good spot with further room to expand on the branding. I look forward to helping them out even more with future endeavors.
Check out their Facebook and website for the latest updates!
Dank House Dyes
Dank House Dyes came to me very early in their formation. I was fresh off of #Inktober sketches and excited to take what I practiced in the month of October toward a paying gig. Dank House was started because Nick just couldn't find a dyed disc that really jumped at him. He took his heavily influenced graffiti and tattoo passion and started putting patterned designs on discs. He enjoyed my overall style and gave me unlimited freedom to explore. We agreed on a handwritten approach and a house to make this logo click with the company name. With their love of horror movies, I made sure to bring a little bit of their personality into the logo. The long quick strokes of my Pentel brush pen combined with the toothy sketchbook paper quality pulled it off almost perfectly.
I simply produced a 600dpi (dots per square inch) scan image and proceeded to clean up in Adobe Illustrator. I'll be honest and mistakenly designed the thumbnail sketches with "Dank House Designs". It was a clear oversight on my part but what really mattered was the overall idea. One more quick revision had me aiming toward the finish line. This was a project and idea that just came naturally. Some logo projects happen that way and I want to thank Dank House Dyes for giving me the opportunity.
Mighty Kind logo creation
Mighty Kind is a quartet out of Brooklyn, NY who play a 90's Rock/ Alternative range of music. I had the opportunity to help a friend create a logo for his band. Our first brainstorming session started with what is tall and mighty but serine? Mountains. So I ran with it initially. I used the Lakota symbol and tried to incorporate where possible because of Sam Combs connection to the tribe. The ending logo outcome doesn't feature that idea but there could easily be other options the band will use in future shirts and graphics.
Major props to my buddy for sending me inspiration as we went through this creation process. I'm happy with the outcome and can't wait to see what's next for them.
You can check out their webpage here:
http://www.mightykindmusic.com/
