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© 2000 by Gary Priester. All Rights Reserved.
Dear Gary,
Thanks to Logos for Design Challenged, I created this logo for City Trees
for my soon-to-be Web page. City Trees will be a Web site devoted to the
role of trees in the city, in effect our perception of Nature as modified
by the urban environment. There will be papers on the history of urban tree
planting and avenue design - going back to the days of ancient China,
Napleonic Europe, etc., stories of plant explorations of 17th, 18th and 19th
centuries which brought a lot of urban friendly tree species to the US. Also
general interest topics such as pruning, fertilization, disease response,
and so forth. To generate repeat specific interest, the site will also feature
a monthly photo and review of an especially interesting interpretation of
landscape design in some of the anonymous tree pit gardens one sees in
cities. Lastly there may be tie-ins to books and catalogs for the urban
gardener. In short the site is tree specific but with a deep base in
landscape architecture and urban gardening.
If you're not too busy, and if you have any suggestions on how to make it
look not so stiff, or more interesting, I would be happy to hear them.
Thanks!!!
C. Maile
Just so happens I'm not so busy, C. Maile. Good thing your first name doesn't start with an E, otherwise you'd run the risk of being confused with e-mail, huh? (I'm sure I'm the first person who ever made that observation!)
If you were wondering where I have been for the last few months, my wife, our five cats, the finch and canary, just moved from California to New Mexico. It took a lot of time to move and get settled in, but settled in we are, and now busy, I'm not.
Before I launch into what I came up with for Mr. C. Maile, I'd like to thank the two or three persons who came up to me at the CorelWORLD Conference in San Diego last September, and introduced yourself and said how glad you were that the Son of the Makeover Maven was now available for free on the Unleash.com Web site. (Remember it used to be in Corel Magazine, which was not free, but definitely in-fre-quent, and not to be seen at the CorelWORLD Conference, nor has it been seen in any other world for that matter). I had a great time doing my two Logos for the Design Challenged sessions, and going mano a mano with my separated at birth twin, the all new and improved, greatly reduced, svelte, and sleek, Dave Huss in our Grumpy Old Men session.
Here is the logo C. Maile submitted for my consideration. While I think the use of the Ts for tree trunks and the use of the y for a walkway deserve a lot of credit for being clever and original, I tend to like logos to be a bit simpler and more designed. I recognize most of the text as being Friz Quadrata, one of my favorite fonts. The C however is not your off-the-rack Friz Quadrata C but looks like it has been stretched a bunch. I don't like to see a font distorted like this unless there is a good reason, which in this case there is not.
My first attempt to bring the tree to the city was modifying a capital Y in a font called Aurora Bold Condensed. I flopped the Y vertically (or is it horizontally-I get so confused), did a bit of surgery to remove the bottom thing, and plunked it down on top of the Y.
My first design felt like it was going in the right direction. So I tried a variation on the theme using Adobe Frutiger 45 Light and a crosshatched pattern, which I PowerClipped inside an oval. I matched the crosshatched pattern with the upraised arms of the Y.
The creative juices were starting to flow. I combined a rectangle with some smaller rectangles for windows (the city) with some stylized branches and leaves (the tree). The font is Courier New, not a font I would use everyday, but it looked right in this exploration.
I created the text for CITY TREES with everybody's favorite font, Avant Garde Light and Medium. (The Y is in Light the rest of the characters are Medium). I created a star-shaped leaf, made a bunch of duplicates, and arranged them around the Y. Hot digitty, I'm starting to get somewhere! Remember, even when you think you have a few good designs, don't stop designing. Plough on. A better design might be hiding just around the corner.
Next I tried something simpler. I created a cloud shape and applied a green fill. I trimmed out some windows and added a trunk and then a drop shadow. I used Tahoma (from Microsoft) for the text. A very circumspect solution for tree and city.
While I had some nice candidates, I thought it might be profitable to change gears and to try something more literal. I created some rectangles for buildings which I Welded into one unit. I assembled a small forest from Corel's Plants symbol library and Welded them into another unit. I trimmed the tree shape from the rectangles shape creating an interesting dropped out effect. A drop shadow added an extra bit of magic to the design. City Trees is set in Friz Quadrata (note the non-distorted C in City).
Here's another literal attempt. I used a simple grid of rectangles to symbolically represent the city and then used my forest of Corel tree symbols which I PowerClipped inside the rectangles. (I combined the rectangles first). The font that looks like an architect's handwriting is Farfel ICG (from Image Club graphics, now a part of EyeWire.com).
This next idea comes courtesy of my right brain which was working away while I was having lunch and looking out at the spectacular view of the mesas and Cabizon from the deck of our new, New Mexico home. I used DRAW's Extrude effect to extrude an H-shape into an I beam. Then I used the Natural Media Pen to draw some branches. Finally I added some maple leaves from the Plans symbol library. The font is Benguiat Gothic Medium. It's always a good idea to let your right brain come up with some designs.
Saving the best for the last, or at least I thought it was the best, you're free to disagree, I constructed a fire hydrant using rectangles and an oval and added a branch and some elliptical leaves. Handel Gothic Medium adds a bit of earth beneath the tree. This solution was light-hearted and fun.
Of the designs I created, I like the last logo best because it is simple, fun, and memorable. It will work fine small as well as big, like on a T-shirt. I had so much fun hearing your comments on the last logo (for the Catering Service) that I though maybe we should have another vote. (After all, the one on November 7 doesn't hold much promise one way or the other). So, contact me in the Graphics Unleashed Forums and let me know which (if any) of these logo designs is your favorite.
Need a makeover. I can't promise anything, but send me a small file with your logo, (please try to keep the files size under 40K) and if I decide to do a makeover, you'll see it here.
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