Pulled From My Files #86: SHAME logo

Images © Lovern Kindzierski, John Bolton and Renegade Arts.

In 2010 I agreed to letter a painted allegorical miniseries for Alexander Finbow of Renegade Arts in Canada, written by Lovern Kindzierski, painted art by John Bolton. Part of the job was to design the cover logo. I believe I started with some rough ideas from John, which I no longer have, but it gave me the approach he wanted, and it was one I liked: thin overlapping letters with graceful shapes offset by a scratchy rendering approach. This first marker sketch is going in the right direction, but is too hard to read.

Version 2 is more readable, and the “fish-hookl” points on the S were a good idea.

Version 3 turns the curves into small straight segments for the most part. The A is a bit hard to read on this one.

Version 4 spreads the E out in a way I like, but it makes the S seem to narrow.

After consultation with the publisher, writer and artist, I did one more version combining the S from version 2 with the rest from version 4. This was approved.

Rather than my usual process of inking over the marker sketch, on this logo I wanted to preserve all the uneven textures and openings, so I simply did a high resolution scan of the marker sketch, made adjustments in Adobe Photoshop, then auto-traced it in Adobe Illustrator, making more adjustments to get the sharp points sharper and the overall texture and thickness as I wanted it.

Here’s the logo on the second issue, for which I also did the cover assembly. I made the logo dark red and added a thin black drop shadow. It’s a bit small here, but I think still works fine. I enjoyed this project, and I’m happy with the way it came out in every way.

More of these when I have time.