May 25, 2004

JoJo's Notebook:
Creating a new logo

I was asked to create a web page for a new research program at work. And, while I'm at it...come up with a logo, 'kay? So, I asked for a bit of guidance and was given the name: Geologic CO2 Storage. And, an image in a Powerpoint file to use as a starting point.

The image:

Well...what to do with that? Hmmm...

The first thing I did was decide on a "text-less" image. Needless to say, I wasn't really happy with the quality of the original image so I opened up Adobe Illustrator and redrew the thing. It took about 20 or 30 minutes to come up with something sharp and clear with smooth lines:

I also got rid of the gray background and the "mysterious" thing at the "collar of water" location. I then took that image into Adobe Photoshop and started playing with fonts. The first thing I latched onto looked like so:

Which was okay but the "O" in CO2 was getting lost. Particularly when I reduced the image:

I tried dimming the red and blue bubble thingy [whoa! getting technical here!] but it just looked washed out and, frankly, rather ugly. Hmmm...what if I took all the black out of the red and blue bubble thingy? That ended up looking okay:

And, when reduced for use on the web page:

I also toyed with putting the red and blue bubble thingy on its own or behind some of the other text but none of those things really seemed to work very well. Considering what I started with, I think the end result came out fairly well, eh? I'm just waiting for the complaints to start rolling in. 'Cause you know they will. Heh.

Until next time...

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