NC Machine Works was in need of a logo. Starting out I didn’t have an idea in mind so the first step was to do some background research to get some inspiration.
One of the first articles I came across was a great step by step outline of the logo design process on ideabook.com. This gave a good insight into the brainstorming phase and how a design evolves. There was nothing unexpected in the article but it was a very interesting read and it re-enforced the need to try a number of different approaches to see which ones stick.
www.ideabook.com
Image Based Designs
If you do a Google search for “logo ideas” two logos will come up time and time again: Spartan golf clubs and Coffee Night. Both are cleaver designs that I like but if you’ve seen them once you’ve seen them a million times.
Spartan Golf Clubs
Coffee Night
Logos with rockets seemed to come up a lot. It must be the ‘onwards and upwards’ message that they are trying to get across. The two rocket based logos that stood out for me were rocketgenius and Launched Design.
Rocket Genius
Launched Design
I was impressed by the renderings that seem to be standard in the design industry. The Launched Design logo as well as the blueboat and neozip below are incredibly realistic and I though they were high quality printings until I saw the same shot with different logos.
I looked at a number of ship based logos and the variety of designs that came from the same theme.
blueboat
Sailing Ship Seafood
neozip
One thing that I noticed was how powerful a simple logo could be. The Neozip logo is much simpler than the Sailing Ship Seafood one above and to me it is much more striking.
emtc machinery
I didn’t find shield based designs the most inspiring but the emtc machinery logo is nice in how it subtly uses a shield outline.
realtor.ca
I like the realtor.ca logo due to the way it looks like it was made on a wire bender.
Unsurprisingly, animals are a popular theme for logo designs.
Billy Turf
The Billy Turf is a solid logo because of the unique image and the way the font matches the image’s style.
Rhino’s Life
The Rhino’s Life logo is by far my favourite of the ones I have come across as part of this study. I think it would make an amazing logo for a machine tool as it is simple but portrays a sense of strength and rigidity.
Typeset Based Logos
A logo can be based around a unique and distinctive typeset that stands on its own.
Boundary Typeset Logo
The boundary logo is truly a work of art. I can’t say anything more about it; just look at it.
Avivo
It is the typeset that is the centre of attention even though the Avivo logo has an image.
Some typesets blend the line between text and images.
Vectortuts
Combination Logos
Film & Television School
The FITS logo is meant to represent the frame boarder of a photo or video but as I work with AutoCAD all day it makes me think of the grips around a selected rectangle.
EDKA digital
The EDKA digital logo is nice and technical featuring geometry and dimensions.
Desenharc Projects & Courses
Desenharc projects and Courses is centred around the scripted ‘D’.
Design Method
Modern logos seem to favour simple geometric shapes. The three images below show how a design is defined using nothing but overlapping circles. Seeing these images made me brush up on my understanding of the golden ratio.
Looking through hundreds of logos gave me plenty of inspiration to start developing my own. I discovered what design cues I liked and made me start thinking of my own ideas.