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© 2000 by Gary Priester. All Rights Reserved.
Thanks to all of you who wrote to say you were happy to see the return of the Makeover Maven, or more correctly, The Son of the Makeover Maven. I sympathize with those of you who lamented the sorry state of affairs at Mr. Maven's former home, Corel Magazine, the quarterly publication. (Isn't a quarterly publication supposed to be published four times a year-or am I missing something?) And thanks to all of you who wrote to compliment me on the Jim Cummings makeover. Including Jim.
This month we have a momentous makeover candidate, Mountain Country Foods. President and General Manager, Doug Ford sent me this request:
We are in the pet food business and located in Spanish Fork, Utah, at the base of the beautiful Wasatch mountains. We specialize in producing treats for pets, primarily dogs and cats. All our products are marketed with other company's labels, so we do not need a logo for a label, just a nicer company logo. Because of our location near the mountains, we like the idea of having the mountains incorporated into the logo. Can You help?
But of course. Never fear, Son of Mr. Makeover Maven is here!.
Doug sent me his card as a CDR file. I can only guess that the logo was created a long time ago. My clue? Panose font matching was looking for Avalon, an old version of Avant Garde, not used since the old WFN font days. The mountains were a bitmap. I used the new, and greatly improved, CorelTRACE 9 to make a vector tracing of the bitmap so I could color it in DRAW, and try out some other effects.
The logo's resolution was rather high which is great for bitmap tracing as the higher the dpi (dots per inch) resolution, the more accurate the tracing. I used the Shape Tool to do some minor editing. I also added some shapes to merge some of the open shapes. Why? Because I wanted to Combine (Ctrl L) the shapes and then Break Apart (Ctrl K) to have a separate outline shape and inside shapes to color as we will see in a little bit.
My first design is very close to the original card with these changes. The text was changed to Benguiat Gothic and the elliptical path widened. I did this by using the Ellipse Tool to create a wider ellipse (approximately 2 3/4" x 1 3/8"). Then I keyed in the text, selected the text and the ellipse, and selected Fit Text to Path from the Text drop down menu. I separated the text from the ellipse (Arrange | Separate) and deleted the ellipse.
To create the cutout shape effect:
Note: Do not use the bounding box handles to move the sides in, because the inside shape will be distorted. Select the top left and bottom left nodes with the Shape Tool and nudge them to the right with the right arrow key on the keyboard. Do the same to move the bottom edge upwards.
I looked at some color treatments using the vector art I created (by tracing the bitmap of the mountains). All but the top right design used the vector shapes with a variety of color fills. My objective was to create purple mountains with a little more majesty. The top right image was created freehand.
I liked this mountain design the best. I used a solid color (Baby Blue) for the outline portion of the mountains. To create a snow-capped effect, I filled the inside shapes-the ones resulting from breaking the shapes apart (Ctrl - K), with a 2-color fill, white on top and Baby Blue on the bottom. This caused the snow portions to fade into the base of the mountain. I created a multi-color custom Linear Fill for the sky to impart a sunrise/sunset effect.
I thought it might look cool to enclose the mountains inside a gold colored ellipse, and this is where CorelDRAW 9's Convert Outline to Object saved the day. Before this feature, creating this effect was labor intensive and not recommended for impatient persons or for persons who are attention challenged. Here's how I made short work of this double filled ellipse.
I added the logo to a card with a wood Bitmap Pattern Fill (inside the Fill Tool flyout). The result is a rustic, Utah country-style logo and business card.
This is one of those things I had to try to get out of my system, and is not the sort of design I'd ever show a client. Why? Because experience has shown me that the client always selects the weakest design and adheres to it like Velcro. Bottom line, never show a client any design you would not want the world to know you designed. I show this design here because I know that Doug is not your average client and has better taste than to fall for a cheap trick like this.
So, how did I make the text into a mountain shape? An Unconstrained Mode Interactive Envelope. I used the outline from the top of the mountains (red outline) for a guide and added nodes and shaped the envelope until the text looked like a mountain.
NOTE: Editing an Unconstrained Mode envelope is similar to editing a curve with the Shape Tool. You can add nodes by double-clicking on the envelope. You can change the nodes from Cusp to Smooth to Symmetrical.
Here's what the enveloped mountain-text looks like on a business card. OK it's not that bad. But still, I would be very reluctant to show it to anyone. The text, by the way, is Impact, a bold and condensed sans serif face with enough bulk to work with this kind of envelope effect.
Here's a more tasteful approach. I created a simple mountain shape (including sides and bottom). The shape is a closed path and is filled white. (Only closed paths can have fills). The glow at the top is a duplicate of the mountain shape, filled Ice Blue, converted to bitmap (Bitmaps menu) with a Gaussian Blur added (Bitmaps | Blur | Gaussian Blur). I created another cutout shapes effect with the text, a cool font called Glaser Stencil, which can be found on the Corel CD in the Fonts folder. Brrr! Looks chilly.
This is a variation of the last design. Using the Shape Tool, I added a bunch of extra nodes, and moved them this way and that, to give the edge a torn paper appearance. I added a shadow to give the torn paper shape depth.
As long as I was trotting out all Corel's new dogs and ponies (how appropriate is that expression?), I thought I might see what happened if I applied some of DRAW 9's new brush stroke effects. I used the outline from the top of the mountain shape (top shown in red) to apply some of the preset brush strokes to. The result was a very calligraphic looking brush stroke that brought to mind the elegant and simple brush strokes seen in Japanese and Chinese calligraphic paintings.
It seemed only fitting that I apply the brush stroke over a textured linen bitmap fill from the Pattern Fills, Bitmap section. I made a duplicate of the brush stoke and created a grayscale bitmap to which I applied a modest amount of Gaussian Blur to soften the stroke and give it the effect of a soft brush stroke applied to wet paper. I added the original brush stroke on top and added transparency to both. The cute little red bullets in the address text are the lower case letter v in the Zapf Dingbats font. How did I do that? I keyed in a v where I wanted the bullet to be, highlighted the v, and selected Zapf Dingbats from the Font List drop down.
I know that Doug requested mountains in his design and I think I have been very diligent in addressing his request. But you know, I have some ideas, too. This design uses Adobe's Critter font, a delightful font in which each letter is also a design of an animal. Each of these characters are extremely well designed and are great candidates for what I call pre-designed logos. But here I had the chance to use the whole lot for Mountain Country Foods. This is a two color design, with the soft drop shadow the same brown as the text.
finally this simple solution. The dog and cat symbols are from Corel's Animals 2 symbols library, in the Symbols Roll-up/Docker. Don't get me started on Dockers! The dog and cat symbols are one of the few things that have not changed since DRAW was a young pup. I made a duplicate of the dog and cat, applied a 40% black fill, converted the shape to bitmap and added some Gaussian Blur (Bitmaps | Blur | Gaussian Blur). I know that I could do this with the Interactive Drop Shadow Tool, but even with all the new controls, I still don't have enough control over the final shadow, and so I prefer the old-fashioned method. I applied a brown fill to the dog and a white fill to the cat to create a positive - negative shape thing. The drop shadow makes the cat's tail and legs visible. Is it me, or when you look at Doug Ford on the card design, do you see Dog Food? Sorry Doug, my eyesight is shot from too many hours staring into the CTR. (My brain's fried as well).
So there you are Doug. See anything here you like? How about you readers? Any designs here that do it for you? Since you asked, I like the design with the animal symbols for the letters. It's fun. It's friendly. And it says animals. I agree that there are no mountains in this design, but the design has charm and is neighborly and memorable. And good design should be able to move mountains, eh? Right off the card!
Well, did I come through? Any questions? Anything I didn't explain thoroughly enough? Let me know by contacting me in the Graphics Unleashed Forums And if you have a makeover candidate, send me a small file (like 30K or under please) with your logo and a brief explanation of why you'd like a makeover. And please keep in mind, these logo makeovers are for educational purposes only. Mr. Maven (or his son) holds the copyrights to the designs but will gladly negotiate a fair price should you decide you can't possibly live without any of the designs.
And finally, those of you who were followers of the Makeover Maven articles when they used to appear in Corel Magazine, when you used to have to pay the big bucks for a vaporware subscription, remember you're getting it here for free. Your support keeps these articles coming. If you plan on making a purchase of a book or other training materials, try to buy it here first. If you plan on purchasing music, or videos or computer stuff, follow Foster's link to Amazon.com. If you make a purchase, Foster gets a few quarters and I get a paradigm (or a pair of dimes) to rub together. I thank you. Foster thanks you. Your fellow readers thank you.
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