From the course: Logo Design: Handmade Aesthetic

Sketch: Refined solutions

From the course: Logo Design: Handmade Aesthetic

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Sketch: Refined solutions

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- The immediacy of a sketch carries a bit of the same allure as looking into someone's private journal. Not that I'm a voyeur, mind you, but I think seeing the early draft of anything before it's sanitized and committee'd to death always gives a better insight into original intent. It's the handmade iteration before being burnished to blimbing perfection that obscures a humble intent. Before the Louvre became a museum in 1793, it spent the previous 800 years as an evolving castle for the royalty of France. If you ever visit the museum, there's a display that tracks the history of the palace itself. Of particular fascination to me were some two foot long scale models of the ceilings of some of the great halls inside the palace. They'd actually been crafted by the great artists that then did tiny renderings of the scenes they proposed to paint. Imagine the artist, trying to knock a scene that was going to span 50 yards across the ceiling down to a number of inches. They were so beautiful because they captured the essence of cherubs and chariots and clouds in the immediacy of gestural strokes. In this chapter, you'll discover how the character of those raw strokes are just what we want to sell. The handmade signature necessary to turn our client's target into a consuming voyeur. Look at how diverse these four logos are. You may be thinking they really appear to all be a bit alike since they're all sketchings, but look deeper. Look at the strokes each designer used, and imagine why they drew these the way they did. The sewing machine uses a diagonal hatching that appears to simulate stitching, where the bottle is loosely drawn from a series of looping gestures that define its volume. If I enlarge this tree used in the "From the Field" logo, I'd probably be disappointed that the detail doesn't stand up, but it doesn't need to stand up because it's intended as a sketch. Although the following marks also use a handmade quality, consider the process from a designer's standpoint. Unlike the previous logos that were sketched with a pen or a pencil of some type, several of these appear to be stitched in thread, or are they created with a pin or maybe on a computer just to emulate the process? I'm not sure it really matters to the consumer how you achieve your design. It is the perception that is their reality. They, too, know it isn't thread when they pick up a package with this printed on the sleeves, but they translate the process of hand-stitching into an assumption of an artisan's involvement. My grandmother used to cross-stitch, and my daughter has even dabbled in it. I know the commitment and the craftsmanship necessary to make even this simple decoration as used in the exhibit mark for the Hungarian National Gallery, and because the public also has grandmothers, if not other crafty folk, they, too, know the commitment and will make the connection to a mark that simulates a labor of love.

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