Intro
Probably my hardest task as a Graphic Designer is self-branding, I have been toying with the idea of changing the logo for my company “The Flyer Master” for a few years now and always running out of time and when I get a chance to pick it back up I am not happy with what had been made. Over the years my company has had 3 different looks, which I feel all have served their purpose.
When I originally launched the company I wanted to create artwork for the Drum & Bass industry but was based in pretty much the most rural location, so I wanted my logo to look urban and edgy, the name “The Flyer Master” was fairly cocky, but I think that helped as I had zero customers at the time and wanted to get peoples attention. so I had just used a Grafitti style font and put something together in Photoshop (cringe… I was young, don’t judge me).
So, fast forward 2 years and I was now working full-time with The Flyer Master being a fairly successful design business. I was working for many different events companies and musicians. Plus, from landing a few big local businesses I was able to rent some office space and have a little team working with me. This is where I tweaked the branding to something cleaner to appeal to more corporate customers, Blue is a trust-worthy colour and the text was clean. I promised my wife that I would leave the company branding alone now.
… I lied! I grew tired of working for corporate companies and wanted to focus my attention more on my Music Industry artwork, I felt more at home there, the work felt natural. I needed to change my branding to suit this better. I decided to play on the word “master” and introduce a face to the logo, the face of a wise kung-fu master. The colour scheme also changed from blue to yellow, as I felt this was a little more energetic – but also is a reference to my love of Dragon Ball Z (Super Sayain hair colour) and also the dots on the head of the guy match Krillin form the show.
Research & Initial Concepts
I am heavily influenced by NBA, chunky 90’s style logos, rave cluture, manga, graffiti to name a few things, I want this to come accross in the new design but I also want to evolve my character into a mascot. I see alot of really cool designs around from NBA teams but there is even more when you start looking at Esports teams.
So, please join me as I create an Esports style logo for my company. Unfortunately, I did not record the first bits of this project. I’ll make sure I do another mascot logo soon and Live Stream from scratch.
As mentioned in the live streams below, I spent a good few months rounding up a collection of images to help me really get a clear picture of what I wanted to create. I made use of Pinterest to collect these and you can check out my board here:
View Pinterst Board →
I then started some very rough sketches to figure out my layout:
From there I fired up Adobe Illustrator and started to work out my text and get the mascot illustration underway.
At this point I was happy with the overal layout. The smiley face was a nod to my roots in rave design and I had the edgy look I wanted. I then hired a pro mascot designer (SevenBlur) to look over what I had done and give me a simplified version.
From this point I started live streamining the process…
Timelapse
In a rush? here the build sped up by around 5000%
Part One
In this live stream session, I start the vector work on a design I have already laid out, I also get the logo text exactly how I want it from experimenting with different layouts. In the next parts, I talk about the project while I’m working.
Part Two
In this live stream session, I start the vector work on a design I have already laid out, I also get the logo text exactly how I want it from experimenting with different layouts.
Part Three
In the last video, I got the mascots layout pretty much how I wanted it. So in this stream, I’ll be making some further adjustments and putting together the final logo (or close to the final). I cover some shading processes to really bring the design to life.
End Result
Thank you for reading / watching. I hope you enjoyed the process 🙂
