Evolution of Gonzo Design Logo

I thought I would write a post about how the branding of Gonzo Design evolved to the current logo. I’ll go through the steps of how I approach logo design and show a few examples of ideas I had come up with.

1. How does your brand name look in different typefaces?

When I begin to design a logo/brand the first thing I do, before even going to paper, is type the wording on screen in a couple of different serif and sans serif typefaces. This very quickly gives me an idea of the character shapes and I can see instantly if there are any clear relation between them.

2. Get your ideas down on paper

This process gives me ideas which I sketch down on paper. I jot down everything that comes into my head, even ideas that aren’t so good. I’ve found that getting everything down on paper at this early stage allows certain ideas to evolve in different and unforeseen directions. The drawings don’t have to be pretty!

3. Getting those ideas onto your screen

When I have a few ideas on paper I power up Illustrator and use the art board as I would a large piece of paper. I find potential logos are still evolving at this stage as there are symmetries and relationships between shapes/characters that sometimes aren’t as obvious on paper.

4. Introduce some colour

I introduce colour later in the development stage to enhance the identities – as you can see in the examples below I mainly just use black and white in the early stages. I only begin to introduce colour if it is specific to the logo i.e. I want the contrast in colours to differentiate between words or shapes.

5. Gonzo Design Development Process

Below you can see the development process that I went through with Gonzo Design and how I ultimately ended up with the GD badge I have now.

Helvetica is great

This first set of logos were made very early in the design process. Helvetica is great a typeface with some great brands using it, so I quickly worked on some purely type logos:

Some nice Veer typeface logos

From Helvetica I moved on to working on some other type logos. I’m a huge fan of Veer fonts and in particular Candy Script. I loved how this logo looked though it could be developed a little more. In the end I felt it looked too much like Carsonified so I tried out another font by Veer; Cocktail Shaker. I was happy with this logo but went on to concentrate on the ‘G’ & ‘D’ of Gonzo Design.

Symbols

There is a lot that can be done with the G & D characters in both upper and lower case. I loved the minimalist block symbols but a friend pointed out that they were far too similar to David Arias‘ own identity. So back to the drawing board!

More Symbols

Carrying on with the idea of symbols, I explored some more typefaces to create the first two letters. I came across a font called Avenida Let Plain. I loved the G and D characters of this typeface as they are almost completely symmetrical. This gave me the idea to position them beside each other and try out different combinations until I finally came up with the logo I have now.

I hope you found my thought process interesting and if you have any questions or suggestions then please feel free to leave a comment.