One Flew Over the Designers Head.

I just finished a logo project for a bird aficionado. The name of his business is "Bird Fellow" and this post will give you a peek into my own creative process, challenges I faced and how I arrived at my final design solution.


Some of the early explorations.

These early explorations show a variety of stylistic approaches and personalities. I did more then what is shown here early on but these are the ones I thought were most interesting myself. We'll start with the top and go down.

The first one I wanted to play off the word "Fellow" and gear the art to be somewhat humorous in the fact he's an aristocrat bird. An upper class fowl sporting a monocle and proudly stating the company name in the Queen's English of course.

The second one I wanted to create a classic, clean, bird mark. I nested (pardon the pun) it inside a circle motif and flowed the type horizontally. You'll notice most are horizontally oriented and that is because the logo will live online for the most part thus they need to work in a header format easy.

These two marks were secondary explorations of the primary layouts I pitched. One on the the left was a badge design utilizing another typeface I tried out. And the one on the right was my attempt to create a Nike inspired bird. I baked down the shapes to create the simplest iconic form of a bird I could.

The bottom two used the iconic bird as the proverbial dot on letter "i" in the logo type.


Some of the mid process explorations.

During this phase of the project the client requested a specific bird species I should create from for a bird logo mark. The "KingFisher". I try to gather this type of information up front but sometimes clients change their mind mid-stream.

The KingFisher is a very cool looking bird and has some nice unique attributes that I thought would work well for a logo so I wasn't worried about working it into new designs. The client also asked for some foliage to be added as well in hopes that it would add a touch of nature to the mark. Good idea.

The top design was based off a doodle the client provided. I thought it was too busy but at this point I just wanted to make them happy.

The middle layout was my personal favorite at this stage of the process.

The bottom approach was a re-work of one of my original layouts shown above.


Refining the bird logo art.

Because I was designing this logo for a bird expert he pinpointed areas in my bird art that he felt needed to be changed to better reflect a KingFisher.

The bottom two birds was my first round of revisions on the bird art. The client now wanted branches without leaves on it but I showed him on with leaves as well. Sometimes you have show more then what is asked for.

The top two birds reflect more specific revisions such as a longer straightened beak, larger chest, refined branches and feet. I also modified the front of the birds head too even though the client didn't ask for it, I just thought it looked better.


The final logo mark.

After a couple months of revisions, tweaks, changes and more changes, I was finally able to arrive at a design solution this bird aficionado liked.


Logo Style Guide.

On all logo identity projects I provide a PDF style guide with all associated files so the client has everything they need to keep their identity consistent through out all their various marketing venues.

The design process isn't always easy, at times it's painful, other times it's annoying and sometimes you fowl out. ;-) I look at the end result of this project and even though I have mixed feeling regarding how the journey played out I am happy with the finished product. And for that I am thankful.