I was finding it difficult to portray the idea of transition with text only, with many of my attempts involving the use of changing letter colours. This came across as bad gradients, so tried using gradients, all of which just ended up looking like early ‘90s crap. So I tried to come up with different graphics that could portray the idea of transition. My first idea ended up being what my final version derived from. I liked the concept, but thought it was a bit too busy and maybe even a bit tacky. I’m a big fan of simplicity, and so I really thought that it was too much like some visual throw up, but one with a solid concept behind it.
Then came this next version, which was even wilder. Despite wanting to make something simpler, I made it more complicated in an attempt to really get the idea of movement going. I think I accomplished the added movement, and thought that maybe it would work well on it’s own (without the text), but that it was just way too busy for my tastes. I debating trying to use it on it’s own, but found it didn’t work at all, even though it probably could with some major work done to it, I didn’t feel like pursuing a road I’d already decided I wasn’t going down.
Determined to fulfill my goal of simplicity, my next design came about. The first version (which I never saved) was still a bit too busy. I had simply made the lines shorter (all the criss-crossing was driving me nuts), but they were still rather thin and the start and end lines were at small, awkward angles. I reduced the number of lines, and then increased their weight to make them a bit more prominent. The idea of black to orange was both to match the text (as far as starting and ending points are concerned anyway), as well as to show a movement from dark to light. A similar idea went into the lines direction, with the vertical line to the horizontal, a sort of ‘standing tall’ symbolism at the end of the journey.
Being happy with this design I tried a few more. One was incorporating an arrow in a few different ways, but I found all of them to be a bit boring and unimaginative. I moved from that to the ‘wave’ concept, which I actually like a bit and think could be rather nice with more development, as it seems to be lacking some life to it. I would have kept going with it, but for some reason it made me think of a bank. I wish I knew why.
To try something else I went with a bouncing ball, from the dot of one ‘i’ to another, but it looks horrible, mostly because of the all caps with on small ‘i’. I probably should try it again with all lowercase letters, but I think it’ll only be slightly less of a failure, so that was that. The last one I tried was the one with the black box, in an attempt to get some irony by keeping the word transition bounded by a black box. In the final version I made the box a bit smaller in an attempt to have the word ‘transition’ escaping the box, but overall I just don’t think the idea works to well for this project.
It wasn’t over here, though. I went with the simple ‘transitioning lines’ one I mentioned above, but I hated how the second line from the right looked, so I then played with a differing amount of middle lines, ranging from the original four, to having as many as seven and as few as one. Anything more than the original was simply too much, and one was, well not dynamic enough. It was pretty much between having two or three, and I felt that three just hit home more for me. It wasn’t overly basic and simple or too crowded. Having only two bars in the middle just lacked a bit of the transitional idea, even though I thought it had a nice look. So yeah, that’s my new logo. I hope you like it. If not, or even if so, let me know.
