brainstorms

Tuesday May 31, 2005

logo designs for rome

today i sent in three of my designs for the ROME project logo contest. all rendered in illustrator amidst two carboncore crashes. [i guess i should be cheered that i am not using tiger; i can actually get some work done instead of banging my head to the nearest wall for all the new and old stuff that are not working properly. sigh, what a flop] i have a number of other designs (on paper) that i simply could not find the time to render in illustrator. some would not have been acceptable anyway: i realized a couple of weeks ago ROME project wanted an all UPPERCASE logo whereas i had been working on all lowercase (surprise, surprise) designs. oh well, good practice anyway, and as david vestal put it, practice sharpens our perception and improves our performance.

some notes:

first one is what i call the paper-cutout logo, one of my favorites, inspired by paul rand and saul bass designs. it is hard to get the cutouts just right: one has to balance the letter cuts, cutout shapes, their placement and their colors. i can see doing dozens of variations until i am satisfied with all four elements. a note on the font: it is linotype herculanum, by adrian frutiger. it is based on the roman handwritings of the first century AD.

second logo is a custom typeface assembled to resemble a futuristic road sign that says something like go here and plug in. this is the logo that would look great on a golf shirt :) [initially, i wanted to assemble these letters as an homage to sun logo, but i could not make it work.]

third logo came out of a serendipitous encounter. i had designs with a connected, semi-cursive ROME when i came across a java applet that generates and solves mazes. [i do not recall how i ended up in a maze] its solution was a path that looked very (very) roughly like an r, m and an e. [sort of like seeing faces in clouds] a path through a maze seemed appropriate for a ROME logo... [most maze generators programmed in the usual way do not generate path crossings as you see with letter O here. these are called braid or multiply-connected mazes]

all submissions for the ROME logo competition are here.

june addendum: public voting site is here. [unfortunately 4images interface is clumsy and sluggish so requires some patience, but please vote.]

related reading: steven heller et al. paul rand, phaidon press, 2000.