Redesigning Subscribers Logos! (Insane Results) 😱

Over the past few weeks, maybe even over a month, I've been working on a logo design redesign. Something that I love to do is to redesign the logos that are posted to our subreddit. That's where I critique all the work that you put up there. And if I see a logo design that I think I could do either better or have a different take on it, I'll go ahead and give it a go. But recently you guys wanted me to show you more of the behind the scenes of how I actually do these, how I get one concept and how I get a different style of concept or where my thought process comes from. As you know, about 90, I think 99% of logo design and graphic design in general happens up here in the brain. The 1% happens on the screen. So hopefully today I'll be able to give you the 1%, if not hopefully more, throughout the whole process. I saw this logo called Fibonacci and it really intrigued me. It was this Fibonacci security logo. I have no context to it, but again, it was a cybersecurity company. It's fictional, it's not real. And I thought, you know, I'm gonna give it a stab. I love the Fibonacci sequence, the golden mean, golden ratio. I love the mystical side of it. It's kind of weird. If you don't know about the Fibonacci sequence, watch my video down below. Designers and architects and artists use it all the time. The first thing I do is research. I wanted to research if this company or this fake company was real or if whether there's a company that's like it. And I couldn't find one, but what I did find is that Fibonacci is used in cybersecurity. Now, the original logo wasn't bad at all. It was actually really good. So this made more of a challenge for myself. I wanted to see what I could do differently for them. So after researching a bit, I went ahead and made some notes and I did this mind map. Mind mapping is a huge part of logo design because you're creating connections that other people otherwise wouldn't. It's very hard to be unique nowadays in creating a logo design. So you need to find connections. And I talk a bit more about that in our Skillshare original class, which is linked below. Now, the sponsor of this video has helped us out so much. It is Printful. Now, if you look at this hat here and any of the clothing that I show you towards the end, they are from Printful themselves. With Printful, you can create and sell custom products online to your audience without needing a lot of cashflow. Normally, you would have to spend hundreds, if not thousands of pounds or dollars on clothing to get it printed. And then you would have to sell the stock. Well, with Printful, you don't have to do that. You just upload your designs, connect it to your shop, whether it's on Shopify, Squarespace. So you don't have to have a stockpile full of products. They will print it on demand and send it to them. And you don't have to pay them a thing. It actually comes out of the product pricing, to which you can still choose. To find out more about Printful, carry on watching. Things that I've put on my mind map are sort of things like tech, VPN company, cybersecurity, scanning through files, and using keywords, maybe phrases that I might use with cybersecurity. Also with the Fibonacci sequence, called the mean, the rule of thirds, the big brother, the kind of ominous nature of Fibonacci, swirls. You can see that this guy who created, or girl who created the last logo, the original one, they used something similar. Brainstorming ideas and mind mapping different keywords and phrases and finding connections is very important. The second part is also just as important, which is mood boarding. Essentially what they allow you to do is the opposite of what a mind map does. It gives you the visuals and a feeling rather than straight up information or connections of words. From a mood board, you get the general mood of the project, you get the colors, and you get to see what's appropriate around this brand. Now, I found out a few things about this. I found that most security company logos are very generic and they all have these sort of like shields or passcodes within them. They love the color blue as well. From this point on, I realized it was gonna be a bit of a challenge because how do you create a security logo or a cybersecurity logo without using any of these shapes that everyone knows is associated with cybersecurity? Now it's time to look at the sketching stage, which is really important. This is where I just spew ideas out. It's kind of like vomiting onto the paper anything just to clear my mind from any preconceived ideas that I might just tunnel vision into. The first idea I had was obviously using the golden spiral within the design. I wanted to get the Fibonacci style in there. It needed to be a part of the design. So I did a bit of research and I worked out what could be used as a golden spiral. And I had this brainwave when drawing that I could use a thumbprint design and kind of make it into the golden spiral into this unique shape, which would make a logo. So I created these shields and the shield was gonna have a thumbprint inside it. And I knew the thumbprint was gonna be a bit tricky to do on such a simplistic scale. You might've seen the thumbprint designs from like Apple and, you know, Touch ID. If you just search on Google, you'll find loads of thumbprint designs. And the cool thing about thumbprints is actually everyone's thumbprint is in accordance to the golden ratio as well. I didn't even know that. So that further incentivized me to keep on this direction. So that's direction or concept number one. The second concept was using a key. Now cybersecurity is all about, you know, having the keys to the kingdom of something. You have a passcode, keys, something that's locked and secure. Now I wanted to see what I could do with a key. I wanted the golden ratio spiral to be in there also. So I started drawing out some ideas where I would use the spiral as the handle for the key. Now normally at this point, I would have just scrapped the idea, but I wanted to show you why I did that or why I would scrap it. So I carried on. Now normally in this process, when I draw an idea that I know flat out will not work, I will get rid of the idea. I will just stop working on it. I will maybe take a record of it or a picture, upload it to my computer. So I know that in my presentation to a client that I can explain to them why it doesn't work without me having to spend the time refining it and vectorizing it. Number one, the key, it gives off the wrong message. We don't want to be perceiving to give people the keys to something when we're trying to lock something safe. So a keyhole would actually be more beneficial or more appropriate. Point number two, the key would look way too vintage and this cybersecurity company cannot look vintage at all. It's very difficult for me not to go to old school style of design. It's something that I love, ominous designs, things that show weird symbolisms. I'm a big fan of, and I always go close to them and then sort of go into a modern route. However, I did create these two icons that could be used. They weren't balanced, but they were very unique as a logo design. Now, another concept that I created was working out the Fibonacci sequence and creating an F out of it. Obviously, I started with these hexagon shapes, which would have one, then two, and then three at the top. I wanted to see if I could create these blocks into an F to sort of illustrate the Fibonacci sequence. But the problem again with that is that it wouldn't look very futuristic. It wouldn't look very secure. It wouldn't work as a logo. And also, because Fibonacci is a very visual thing for people, it's not just like the actual practicality of it, of adding one, then one, one, then two, one, one, stuff like that. Because people don't want to be reading that and it's not instantly viable for people to read that, I wanted to get the actual spiral in there, the visual indicator. So after those concepts, I moved onto the iPad. I like to draw in real paper most of the time until I need to do more refining to my sketches. I knew I was onto something with this idea, but I had to go ahead and create some wacky spirals to try and make it look like a thumbprint at least, or even just an abstract inclination of a thumbprint. So instead of doing the thumbprint inside a shield, I started playing around with certain spirals, seeing how they would fit together. And I found that the golden ratio spiral can actually fit together and mix in and look pretty unique. Created this sort of spiral pattern, which is kind of like, it's sort of nodding its head towards an abstract thumbprint. So in essence, I'm trying to get cybersecurity in there and a thumbprint made by the Fibonacci to marry the both together a bit more appropriate. So now that I've done some preliminary sketching and everything else, it's time to bring it into Illustrator. Now, Adobe Illustrator is a great program that I use all the time. That's how we vectorize our logo designs. But I must stress, I haven't spent as much time in Illustrator as I have in sketching. What you've seen in the sketching and the ideation process has all been sped up, but this part is obviously more interesting for you to watch so you're gonna see more of it. In Illustrator, I get the golden ratio in there. I create the spiral, I create the golden circles. Got a video all about that, link in the description. And I go to work creating, trying to anyway, create a thumbprint in a shield type, but it didn't really work because it was looking a bit too cartoonish. I didn't like the balancing of it and there was too much details in the other spirals that I was seeing. I'd have to create these sort of spirals outside of the main Fibonacci spiral, which was not part of the Fibonacci sequence, which kind of ruined it for me. And I'm kind of pig-headed with that and I wanted to keep the Fibonacci exact all the way through. That was until I created these two spirals. I used one Fibonacci spiral, I copied it, flipped it and I put it together and it created this really cohesive spiral. Looked like an abyss, like one of those illusions. From there, I created a few more of them, cleaned it up, added a typeface underneath, which was more towards a vintage typeface. And that is because I was thinking purely too much about when Fibonacci sequence was used, kind of like with Da Vinci and everyone else. So I wanted to use a typeface that winked to the old. Moving towards the end of the design process for the logo, I added a circle around the spirals to see what would happen. And I really liked the look of it. It kind of looked like a lollipop, like one of those old school lollipops. I played around with it, but again, it looked more like a hotel logo than a cyber security logo. It didn't really work. I added a triangle and I did weird things to the logo to see what I could do to make it different, but it didn't work. As well as that, the typeface was like this sort of serif old school typeface. Didn't really speak cyber security. That was until I started putting the spiral into different shapes. Now I brought Jim over to have a look, see what I could do, see his thoughts and opinions on them. And he said the same things that I was thinking, which was, it's not really appropriate for cyber security. You know, you want a chunky font, you want this shield type logo. Although cliche, it worked. So I started putting the spiral in like a triangle. Then I went and did what I thought I wouldn't do, which is create this sort of shield. It's a square with a round bottom. And I put the logo inside of it. And that's where it hit. It actually worked. Number one, it looked like a shield. Number two, it looked like a thumbprint. Number three, it's got the Fibonacci sequence in it. And number four, it looks like a keyhole. I hit the nail on the head there and I was super happy with it. So I went ahead, played around with some fonts and I started working on this to see what I could do. From here, I had the logo that I was happy with. I was happy of showing this. It was different enough and it fit, ticked all my boxes. It was unique. It was scalable. It was abstract enough. And it was recognizable as well. And of course it fits the proportions of the golden ratio too. So the reasons why I choose a logo like this and I tunnel vision into one is because there's a time when you've exhausted every other option and you're sort of narrowing down a direction. And when you get to a certain direction, you just know it's the right way because you sort of canceled out all the other places you could go. From this point, it was time to start mocking things up. I went to Envato Elements and I brought in some mock-ups to see how it would look like in the real life. It looked great on t-shirts. It looked great with like cyber security, holographic mock-ups that I found. I'm seeing if it would work as like marketing material really. But to really test out whether this logo works, I had to go to Printful.com who are sponsoring this video. I wanted to see what this design would look like in the flesh. Now, if you remember my last redesign, I redesigned this one, which is called Drip Fashion. And I bought a hat, I bought t-shirts. Well, I've done the same for Fibonacci. I bought different elements, different products that are appropriate that you might see in either the shop or employees wearing. Now, the great thing about Printful is that I can order one of these to see for myself. Instead of having to use mock-ups all the time, I can take my own images of these and they're very inexpensive to actually get from Printful. So again, if you want to get your products seen and you want to get people buying your products without having to spend loads of money on stocking up, use Printful. Honestly, it's amazing. I'm never buying a hat. I'm always doing my own hats now, from now on. And there you guys have it. That is how I redesigned the Fibonacci logo. I don't know which you like. If any of these concepts that I've shown you, you like, explain why. If you don't like any of them, let me know. The final logo isn't really the final one. What I want to do is ask you guys which concept I should have gone for. You obviously know the one that I went for, the one that I prefer, but it'd be interesting to hear your comments. Now, if you do have any questions, number one, make sure to subscribe and two, comment them down below and I'll do my best to answer every single one. I do look at them, but I can't answer every single question. But there you guys have it. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. See you soon. Goodbye.