Music Logo Development // Stage 2

After scanning in the chosen logos I started working on a couple of them, I was still undecided which one I wanted to develop further and still wasn't convinced by any of them. After having scanned in some designs and not really making much progress with them I decided to go back to the basics of just using typography to see if I could get more of a sense of the feel of the brand and then move onto the logo from there.

I want to keep the typeface sans-serif because of the type of music I am trying to represent which is minimal sounds and modern, bold design. I went through all the new typefaces I downloaded to see which one I felt was the most appropriate.

Unfortunately I still wasn't happy with what I was coming up with so I went back to my idea at stage one and started playing around with lower case characters in different typefaces and see which one I could us.

I found that when I placed the characters close together in Helvetica Neue Bold, the shape and the point at which the characters joined together allowed me to edit the anchor points so it could look all as one.

I had my progress tutorial half way through the day yesterday which was perfect because I had just come up with the main logos that you see before, I was near to scrapping them and starting again but I got good feedback from development on the Helvetica Neue logo which gave me a a bit of a boost to develop it further and carry on with it and see what happened.

Logo Development_Stage 1

This is the logo that it was based on however after live tracing and using the pen tall to trace the logos I still wasn't happy so in the end I just used a typeface as a basis rather than trying to develop it off my hand rendered work, which actually worked much better. 

As you can see from the development above, it took many small and constant changes until I was happy with the new appearance of the logo, I kept having to change the angles of the cut off, but it was the counter of the 'a' which gave me the most problems, because every time I changed it, the cut off and stem of the character looked wrong, but eventually I got there. 

I am happy with what I have come out with although I still feel there is room for more development and that it is just in the early stages of design. 

I want to have two parts to the logo, one which is just the 'amr' on its own or within the shape, and the other part which is the complete logo with the name of the brand underneath so I started trying out different formations and typefaces. 

I want to keep the typeface sans-serif so I started looking at BEBAS. This is a typeface which I have used a lot throughout my work and I have noticed that many of the music based promotional designs use a very similar typeface so I was interested to see how it would look. I then wanted to contrast it with a slightly lighter typeface and something that was more decorative, the above designs are the two that I cam out with. I feel that the Bebas typeface (top image) is too heavy and doesn't work with the rest of the logo, and I feel the bottom typeface (Imelda) doesn't fit with the rest of the brand. 

To my surprise using Future typeface worked much better than the Bebas typeface. It is clean and bold without being too overpower and does fit with the rest of the brand. I feel the top image from this selection is the best, it has more kerning and as a result is more readable. Looking at many music designs, a fair amount of them have rather excessive kerning but still work. 

This was the latest logo that I came up with. What I noticed when I was researching logos and picking out the ones that I liked the most was that the majority of them were enclosed within a circle and some of them had an inner thin line. I am pleased with how it looks although I feel there is still something missing from the logo.  

I wanted to see what the logo would look like on the style of photography that I intend to use in my editorial pieces. I am happy where it is at right now although this does confirm that there is still something missing from the logo, I just don't know quite what! I need to go back and look at other logos and see what they have and what I can do to improve this one.