This finished logo is for a fictious production company I created called Good Morning Productions. This logo would be used at the end of movies and TV shows made by the company. It’s similar to the animated Disney castle or the Universal world logo that appear at the beginning of movies.
There were several influences for this logo. The sun and parallel lines that form a trapezoid were influenced by the BBC News logo from the ’80s. The colors and fonts were inspired of the Miami Vice logo. The overall tropical aesthetic was also very inspired by the setting of Miami Vice and Hawaii Five O. The Vapor Wave art movement was also an inspiration.
All my favorite movies and TV shows came from the 80’s and those are the types of projects I’d want this company to make. So, I figured the logo should mirror the content the production company would make. The rising sun not only ties into the name Good Morning Productions but symbolizes the beginning of a new creative era and new opportunities on the horizon. The parallel blue lines are meant to mimic a power charging symbol. This shows that this production company is reaching max power and potential as well as being an homage to 80’s technology displays. For the final font I decided to go with something big and inviting, that looks like it was maybe painted on by hand.
When I started sketching this logo I knew I wanted to include a rising sun since the company is called Good Morning Productions. For the most part, even my final logo does not stray far from my original sketch. The main differences are instead of tiny rectangles used to represent the sun’s beams, I went with a jagged line. This choice was made because I wanted the design to look cleaner and flow more. Also, a straight line is much more recognizable and easy to distinguish is the logo was ever shrunken down to a tiny size.
Speaking of scalability, I used mostly basic shapes so that the logo could be scaled down but still recognized. This logo is something everyday people could sketch in notebooks and draw inspiration from. I also think the logo is recognizable even without the text, which was an important factor I considered when designing it.
All of the elements included in the final logo were created by me except for the fonts I used. These were taken from a site that I used in an Illustrator tutorial earlier in the Unit. All of the fonts listed on that site are listed under free use.
When I began constructing the logo in Illustrator I used the trim feature to create a half circle for the sun. To create the sun’s rays, I created a straight line of spikes. I then used the warp tool to bend the straight line around the sun. A trick I picked up was to select a vertical half of your project it, then reflect it to create a perfectly symmetrical logo. This is a technique I sued.
After submitting my draft and receiving critiques the overwhelming similarity between them all was that the font on the logo looked off. This was my biggest self-critique as well. Originally, I used three different fonts and that just became overwhelming because of the lack of visual similarity. In my final I simplified it to only two fonts, one for Good Morning and the other for productions. I still wanted to keep the same homemade motel sign/ ‘80s TV show logo so I mostly repurposed the fonts from my original project. I also decided to center the fonts and keep the words parallel to the bottom of the sun. Though I still like the slightly turned diagonal look I couldn’t get it to fit with this logo.
I also redid a lot of the colors from my original draft in my final. I made the blue lines a little darker so they’d show up more on a white background. I also made the sun’s gradient darker at the bottom and brighter at the top. Finally, I added more glow to the sun’s rays to make the whole thing stand out much more.
The biggest challenges I faced while making this logo were keeping everything centered and symmetrical, and finding the right mix of colors. To make sure things were symmetrical overall I really utilized the view grid option on the project file. This allowed me to better center everything, especially after I turned on snap to grid. This way I just wasn’t eyeballing everything. For the colors I knew I wanted there to be an orange yellow gradient for the sun and then I just worked my way back from there. I used an analogous orange for the text and then a complimentary blue for the parallel lines, all which I learned about in the Color Theory readings from the last unit.
Overall, I am very proud of how the final logo turned out. It is even better than how I originally pictured it.
Noah Benson 