I heard your feedback and you wanted to see a logos redesign process where I work on one logo that needs to be redesigned for longer. So, I’ve actually spent hours on this. I don’t know how many hours I have spent but it’s been days of work. The only problem was that there was no context to the design. So, I just took the idea of it just being a fashion brand. So, I did a bit of research.

Do Research

The word “Drip” is an adjective to describe your outfit. Similar to just like swag. That’s from the Urban Dictionary. So, that gave me a few ideas. First of all, the idea of a drip, like a drop. So, instead of dripping, logo designing services wanted something that was easily identifiable as a drop.

Obviously, this idea was kind of strange because I didn’t want it to look, you know, too cliché but I thought I would create something like a pattern out of it. So, I started just drawing on my sketchbook after doing a bit of research looking at the name. I just wanted to get a feel; should I go for like a logo type design? Should I go for an icon, should I do both? Should I go symbolic? This time in the paper is really a time for me to just sit and spew like kind of vomit those ideas out.

Bit Of Pressure But Generally

There’s a bit of pressure but generally, no one’s watching so I can be as messy, I could be as bad as I want to. You can see that I also write keywords down quite a lot. Writing these notes was kind of like my little brief. I wanted to have like a target age range, you know, where they would be based, who it for and a sort of vibe going on.

I didn’t really do a mood board for this because I already had it in my head but I couldn’t really get it out there. It was kind of like this prison tattoo vibe – biker gang – that was very minimal. So if you take Apple and biker gang next to each other, that’s what I was going for. This sort of like luxurious – luxurious… I can never say that word. What’s wrong with me? The sort of like luxurious, minimal biker gang prison style tattoo design.

As I was drawing, I was getting a bit of pressure because I was like “Everyone’s watching me”, you know, “This is probably going to be a really boring blog.” So, I wanted to change it up slightly just to get out of my comfort zone. So, I thought about doing a vertical logo, which is kind of like putting drip down. I scribbled that out straight away, it did not work well.

Drawing On Piece Of Paper

Another thought that enters my head whilst I’m like drawing on this piece of paper is what if it was like a signature? So, I started doing a signature style design which is something that I’m known for doing quite a lot. I’m a hand lettering artist. I do lots of logo type design. So, I thought drip fashion is long enough and it should be identifiable enough with the ‘D’ and the ‘F’ that people would be able to see it at small scales. So, what if I was to go really like ornate with this? I also had this weird ideas of putting like the drip inside of the ‘D’ but I had this just this one imagery, this one icon.

It was the drop and I wanted to come up with a way of using that drop without just being a pattern in a really easy way. So, out comes my iPad. I sort of make one drip shape and I used the Symmetry tool in the iPad so it will be balanced and symmetrical across all the axes that I wanted to and I wanted to create the sort of diamond shape with the drip.

I thought that repeating the drips in a cool shape would just give this sort of vibe of cleanliness and orderliness, but also the drip is really indicative of a prison tattoo – the drip in the eye I wanted those teardrops to be there. I think that was the sort of vibe I was going for. From this point on, I knew that I wanted to create the tattoo style and the way that I did that was through line work.

Drawing The Drips In Different Ways

You can see that I’m drawing the drips in different ways, putting them in different areas and I even thought about putting like a crystal inside of the actual drip. I wanted it to work out a way to make it look like a crystal drip in a line work fashion but the problem was is that it didn’t look like a crystal that much. It kind of just looked a bit weird. It just had this weird lines in there. Also, ‘drip’ actually means bling as well, which is where I got that idea from which was just to put a gem inside of it.

But again, it looked a bit too complicated for what I was going for. So, I carried on with this idea of bringing the drips in and just changing them around. I wanted to see what would happen if I put this vintage crest on. Now, I also wanted to talk to you about what inspired me in this project. Now, I have these playing cards.

Hyperfixation

I get these like hyperfixation obsessions. I get fixated on random things every now and then and recently, it’s been playing cards. I’ve been buying a lot of these premium playing cards from like Bicycle and Theory 11 and they’ve got amazing illustrations and designs on them. They’re really intricate. As someone who loves Victorian hand lettering, sign writing, and all these Victorian ornate assets, I wanted to sort of somehow get that in there to see if it would change the vibe.

I use the Symmetry tool in Procreate to see if I could create that Victorian nature inside of the design but the problem was, is just – it just became even more complicated. It’s not that I didn’t think it would work, it was just taking the project somewhere that it didn’t need to go. So, we’re a few hours in now and I’m sort of getting the hang of what I want to do.

You’re A Designer

I’m sort of seeing it in my mind and if you’re a designer, you’ll know what that means. It means that the design in front of you – the drawing, the scribble doesn’t look good but you can see it as clear as day in your mind as to how it looks and now, it’s all about trying to give it to you guys. So, still on my iPad, I go ahead bring Adobe Illustrator up. It’s an amazing app that I use on the iPad. It works just the same. I can easily switch between my iPad and the computer no matter where I’m at. So, when I brought it into Illustrator, I created these drip effects.

I wanted to see which stroke width I should use… I knew that the drips weren’t evenly spaced out together. So, I put this sort of ‘X’ in the middle and I thought, you know, “That kind of looks cool. What if we just put the drips in like into the corners of the X?” and I kind of like the look of that but again, it looked a bit too straight edge. You know, people have those straight edge marks on them. It looked a bit cringy. So, we sort of played around with it bit more. Again, it didn’t work. I played around with the colors. I like the color red because it’s you know, it makes sense – prison tattoo, red, blood, all that stuff.

The Idea Of Having A Crystal Inside

I even went back to the idea of having a crystal inside one of the drips as the main icon, but again, it didn’t work. There is a way of doing it. I know there is. There must be somewhere, somehow to create this crystal drip but unfortunately, I was too like in the zone for the one that I wanted to create which is just the symmetrical drips. Now, the one thing that keep in mind when doing any of these projects is scalability and legibility. Scalability is really important in any logo design as you know because it needs to be seen when it’s small and recognizable and it also needs to be memorable.

Memorable designs are simple ones generally and that’s why we go simpler and simpler because it stays in your mind easy. A good rule of thumb of how memorable and legible and readable a design is is if you show it to someone for a few minutes and then take it away, go back to them 10 minutes later with a notepad and pen and ask them to draw the logo that they saw a few minutes prior. If it’s anywhere close, then you’ve done a pretty good job.

I Have The Icon

The next thing I wanted to work out was the logo type. That’s my forte, moo-waah, that’s where I go, but having an icon means that I’m going to have to have a logo type. I’m a big fan of not just having icons, but you’ve got to have words in there as well for them to read and it would just reaffirm the brand name. It wasn’t a must for this because the actual icon itself is just a bunch of drips, kind of look like rain but I wanted to have the word “Drip” in there because I wanted it to look a bit more minimal, a bit more formal than what it looks like now.

I started drawing out what I thought that I would like in Procreate but I quickly scrapped that because it was going to take way too long and obviously, this blog I have already spent hours on it in the idea generation. Either way, I sort of stopped the logo type part, went into Illustrator on my computer and this is where it really started. This is where the fun was because I got to put the drips in, I got to grid them up and what I do is I need to grid them in a way that works well.

Try A Few Different Methods

I kind of put them together, try a few different methods. I thought I would have to actually create a grid of some sort, but it turns out I didn’t. All I needed to do was like flip them to the left 45°, just duplicate them over because it became a square and then flip them back over and it was perfectly gridded up. The next part, logo type part two. The logo type was a really tricky one for myself because obviously the design was going to be really clean at first.

I Didn’t Like That

I wanted it to be slightly rough. I wanted it to look like a tattoo. If you ever have a close-up look at someone with a tattoo, it doesn’t look clean. I wanted – it looks like it’s bleeding at the edges. I needed to get that feeling across. So, it was imperative that the logo type that I chose with the font, obviously I had the right licenses and everything, also that it would work well when it’s bleeding at the edges and it was a little bit stylized. So, I took the design, I made sure that I outlined it. That’s something that I do when I finished with the icon.

Also Read: 10 Websites with Data Visualization For Designer

I was quite happy with that, and I created another Artboard in Illustrator and I just went ahead and went ham. I just started choosing type faces that I saw. I was like, “I don’t know”. It could be a gothic one, it could be a Serif one, it could be a Slab Serif, it could be a display one but then, I sort of settled on the idea of just going for a Sans Serif one, basic Sans Serif and that was the best thing I did. I don’t know why I didn’t just start with simplest. I went with the most ornate one first.

Layout And Composition Of The Design

It’s all about the layout and composition of the design. Now, I wanted the icon and everything to be laid out really nicely. I didn’t know whether to go for like a layout where it was on the left of the logo and the actual like words on the right. I just wanted something that worked well. I messed around with it and I came up with a solution. It was just stacking them on top. Something that you don’t see but I’m looking at all the time is making sure that the line weight, so the actual weight of the typography is matching the weight of the line art in the drips. If they don’t match, it kind of looks like diss-attached and disstached?

Not Attached

Whatever the word is. It doesn’t feel cohesive. So, in order to make it cohesive, you choose the line weight or the weight of the typography to be the same as much as possible. I chose a font that I really like. I wanted to have some little artifacts in there as well just because it is a tattoo inspired design. Then I do this called “roughing it up” and the way that I do that is I rasterize the type and all the artwork that I’m working with. I then image trace it back in.

What this does is rasterizing it makes it into a normal image, so it’s no longer a vector and then when I image trace it back in and ignore the white and do all the settings, it will have a little bit of roughness to it. It won’t look perfect but it will still be legible. It kind of rounds corners. It gives it a more aging look. Now we have the finished logo design, but it doesn’t stop there. In order for this to be like a real process design blog for you, I want to show you what it looks like to create the assets around it. I went to Envato Elements to go ahead and pick out some mockups that would work.

Use Envato

It’s a great place to find mock-ups and design resources but really, I wanted to find a tag mock-up. That’s something that I could just make a tag out of to show the brand and also some packaging mock-up for like a luxurious brand so I can get the feeling there. It’s not enough just to have a logo, what I’m trying to do here is like present to you guys my pitch.

I’m presenting it to you. You’re like my client, which is kind of a scary thought. So, I chose this tag mock-up and I just worked with it a little bit. I’m still playing around with it but I had this idea again of bringing the drips as a pattern in the background. I’m a real big fan of using a part of the logo design as like a brand asset. So like the background pattern and the drips work really well. It kind of looks like rainfall. Obviously, I’ve created even more mockups as well.

Design Works

I wanted to make sure that you guys can see what it would look like in reality and it helps me as well with my confidence to make sure that the design works. This is the prime time of where you spot mistakes in the design – whether it’s a functional one or a form one. But that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to actually see something physical. See the design in the real world, but getting things printed can be you know, expensive.

I went to Printful. So, Printful is sponsoring this blog but for a good reason. As you can see in this blog, I just got some test products sent to me. Now, Printful allows you to connect it to a shop so you can do drop shipping services so you don’t ever have to fulfill the items. That means that you don’t have to pay for like hundreds of pieces of clothing that you have to then sell.

Upload The Design

In fact, it’s a lot more economical than that. You can just upload the design there – when someone orders it of your website, whether it’s a Squarespace one or Shopify website, then you can go ahead and do nothing. Just have to wait for them to print it and then they will send it for you and you don’t have to do anything and you keep the profit as well which is insane. You set the price too, which is even more insane.

In fact, we use Printful on our web site (assets4d.com) to sell the poster of the vector pack which you can actually see right there. It makes a little appearance. Museum print quality. It’s insane! Some of these products I was pretty happy with the overall design.

Design A Hopefully Design

When they got sent to me, I was really happy, they looked good and hopefully you guys can see the power of a rebrand and what it can do and also the power of getting products sent to you. Now, something that you can do is if you need a portfolio piece with real images and you have some fake designs that you’ve created that could look good on T-shirts or hats, you can actually just upload them to Printful, buy them for yourself, take some pictures for yourself and add them to your portfolio.

But not only that, if you just want to make money as well without ever having to have client work, you can just upload your designs, make a website, connect Printful to your website which is really simple and sell your T-shirt designs without ever having to worry about the fulfillment side. You just have to be the creative it’s insane.