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© 2000 by Gary Priester. All Rights Reserved.
This month's makeover candidate will give you the shakes. (Actually sell them to you). Not the kind that comes from too much partying, but the split cedar wooden variety that look so splendidly rustic on your roof. Especially if you have a sloping roof. Cedar shakes don't look all that good on flat roofs I wouldn't imagine. But here I am going off into the woods, when I should be giving you some background on S&K Cedar Products.
Wendy Gibson sent me this request:
I have been following your articles of late and am interested to see what you could come up with for our business's current logo. I designed the logo myself, upon first receiving a computer 1 year ago and having 0, and I mean 0, graphics experience.
Our business (my husband's and mine), makes cedar roofing shakes, you can read a little about how we came to starting this business at http://mypage.direct.ca/c/cedar/about.html. It's a rather gruesome story, actually, but the company that tried to destroy us actually did us the biggest favor in the world!!! Funny how that works out! I would be honored to see how creative you could be and maybe hopefully some of it will rub off on me.
Warmest regards, Wendy
Moving and Shaking
This is Wendy's logo for S&K Cedar Products. It meets one of my desired prerequisites for a good logo, which is whenever possible, try to communicate the nature of the business. It does fall a tad short of my other desired prerequisite, simplicity. But I've no doubt that's why Wendy contacted me. Some times it's hard to see the forest for the trees, eh?
Often it helps just to get something on paper (or on the screen as it were). Anything to start with so as to give the brain a chance to kick in. Here are four such attempts to kick start the design process. The logo in the lower left was an attempt to build letters using the shingle's wedge shape. It felt forced.
But this brings up a good point. When you begin any creative project, try not to self censor yourself. If you do, you'll never get anywhere. Crank out as many designs as you can, and don't worry about whether they're good or bad. Just crank, and crank, and then crank some more. Sleep on it, then start again the next day. Many times the right brain, the non-verbal creative side of our brain, will kick in with something. It is rare that this will happen when you want it to happen. More often than not, the big idea will come to you on the freeway, or in the shower, in a dream, or while you're doing something altogether unrelated. That's the way the right brain works.
Hoping for what's left of my right brain to kick in for me proved futile. Well, almost. I did the logo on top, using Handel Gothic. Not much of a logo. But then I wondered what might happen if I rotated the K? I did and it made a roof shape supporting the S. Or am I just hallucinating?
Well I played around with the letter shapes and tucked everything together to make a nice simple mark. I used 100% natural cedar colors. Not too bad for a start. Just about the time I was thinking this was kind of cool, my right brain whispered to me, "Use the right tool for the job, fool!" My right brain can be a bit overbearing sometimes. Huh, whuh? I responded. But of course by this time my right brain had gone back to watching South Park and was not responding. Then smack upside the head, it hit me! The right tool for the job, of course!
Before starting this makeover, I spent several days writing a review for Xara 3D 4, the latest version of Xara's cool little 3D bitmap and animation application, which is what Corel should have incorporated into DRAW instead of their outdated bitmap Extrusion effect. Sorry Corel (they get so hurt when you criticize their products), but it's true. Xara 3D 4 (not to be confused with Xara-formerly Corel Xara-the vector drawing application) was cool when it first came out a few years ago and it's even cooler today. And it would be perfect for turning my flat 2D logo design into a realistic 3D wooden logo.
I saved the logo in Xara's XAR native file format, although DRAW users can use the WMF (Windows Meta File) or EMF (Extended Meta File) file formats, and I opened the file in Xara 3D 4. I right clicked on the logo, selected Text Texture and found the perfect wood fill in the Textures folder. This is the entire application window which is about as small as the 2 MB file size. You can bring in a logo, as I have done here, or just create cool text and symbol effects right in the program. Sliding the bottom and/or right side sliders rotates the object, or you can drag it and free rotate it in any direction on any axis. It's all too extraordinary!
Xara 3D 4 has incredibly easy and intuitive lighting controls. The three colored three-dimensional arrows are the light sources, which can be dragged in any direction, along any axis, both in front as well as behind the object. When the shadow option is selected, a fourth black and white striped arrow appears as the light source. The color and intensity for each light source and shadow can be individually specified.
There are 22 bevel shapes which apply instantly (as do all modifications) when selected. While I liked this Round Faced bevel, it didn't seem appropriate for a shake and shingle company. But it was fun to try.
Whilst I was playing, er, make that exploring design directions, I tried some straight type treatments as you can see here. I used the font Jokeman for the image on the right in the center row. I didn't think it would look that great but it looks as if it's been hand-carved!
Even though Xara 3D 4 can create some awesome 3D animations, I really like its ability to create bitmap images. You can save bitmaps in GIF and JPEG file format as well as Windows BMP and PNG file format. When saving in PNG file format, you can select 8-bit or 24-bit with alpha channel transparency. And Xara antialiases the bitmap to the background color, so if you plan to use the image over a brown-colored background bitmap, for example, you can antialias to that color for a clean, no fringe transparent background. But enough technical talk. I'm starting to sound like a commercial, when my assignment is to come up with a logo for Wendy's company.
And here it is. A unique and distinctive logo that says WOOD (well, actually CEDAR). Rotating the logo a bit as I have done, makes it more active and more dimensional. The soft shadow also helps pop the logo off the card. Wendy didn't send me her address and other information, but you can visualize how it would fit on this business card. Nice sans serif font like Frutiger or Helvetica in a nice tasteful point size, about 8 to 10 points max. Quite handsome if I might be allowed to be so immodest.
Our good friend, Rick Altman has used this title for many of his popular sessions which he gives at his CorelWORLD Conferences. However, whereas Logo Motion might be a bit of over promise for Rick's examples, it certainly is not so for this animation. The animation shown here is a brand new feature called Step animation, which as you can see, steps through a series of words and/or logos and symbols. You can preview all the animation types, there are a bunch, and then export the animation, even if you have never created an animation in your life. The only thing to watch out for is file size. This one has gotten a bit robust.
So, what do you think Wendy? This work for you? If not, I hope it got your creative juices flowing. And remember the logos created here remain the property of the Son of Makeover Maven, unless you shake a few dollars loose (sorry couldn't resist that one!). But the inspiration is always free!
Xara 3D 4 sells for a trifling US $39.00 and is available for download and purchase at Club Xara. You can try the product free for 15 days. When you purchase Xara 3D 4, Xara will send you a CD with the application, some fonts, a ton of additional texture and sample files. It's a really good deal, and a really cool product.
You're probably expecting me to make some disparaging remark about Corel Magazine, the former home of Mr. Maven, Senior. Well you're wrong. Mr. Maven, Junior is above such pettiness and is not going to say anything about the fact that for a quarterly, Corel Magazine certainly has a different method of counting quarters that I do. To me a quarterly means once a quarter, as in four times a year, not once in four years, but what do I know. So even if it's a valid observation, I am not going to make it. After all, why kick a magazine when it's down?
Unlike Corel Magazine, which it would appear does not give you much for your subscription dollar, most of the articles on Unleash.com are available for free. It's your support that 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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