mattmoore.blog()

In the past year, I have stopped using an alarm clock (or my phone’s alarm clock) to wake up in the morning.  In addition to my technophobic refusal to be ruled by machines, alarm clocks create unnecessarily stress starting my day and make it difficult for me to remember my dreams.  The challenge of being alarm clock free, however, was that I didn’t want to be as disciplined about the time I went to bed.  It took me some experimenting and research to figure out the alarm clock’s Achilles’ heel:

To wake at a consistent time–even with variable to-bed times–is to eat something as soon as you get up in the morning.   Your body will  respect this eating schedule and wake you up at the same time each day.  The only downside it makes it really hard to sleep late on weekends–but afternoon napping is fair game!

Worked on this logo project this weekend with Dave and Evan.  Went through several rounds of exploration until we finally settled on the last logo design.  We wanted something that was fun, playful and simple .  The first round was decidedly too cartoony.

Round two was a little more serious, a little more iconic. Tried some different type faces and imagery that was slightly less illustrative. I also had the idea of a kid on a swinging trying to swing really really high. I think it was an interesting idea but started to get a little too whimsical and poetic.

The rocket ship seemed like the more interesting silhouette.  Tried two more figures to see if I could come up with something that was a little less nostalgic than the kid on the swing. Jet packs and climbing seemed slightly more adventurous.  Although I think the execution never really got there. Also, with this round, I tried to de-emphasis the “kid”.  I really wanted the focus to be on clouds, flying, imagination than kid. Even when you say “cloud kid” the emphasis is on the first word.

The forth round was an attempt to take all the comments, and make some initial choices about direction. All three designs used a rocket ship, all three had two words with different text emphasis.  The rocket ship was a much more interesting item to focus on because it has a really strong silhouette value but also could look really great illustrated in full color.

With the fifth round I really wanted to show a high detail and low detail version of the logo to see where the strengths and weaknesses were. I also wanted to make one last attempt at the figure logo. There was something that was really interesting about the swinging kid, jet pack kid. In this forth one, which I anticipated would be a throw away, I decided to add a kite to the climber from the other round.   However, it kept reminding me Dreamworks’ boy fishing.  The first option was by far the strongest. I got rid of the de-emphasized text for “kid” because it was hard to read the tail of the jet with the skinny ‘k’.  I could, however, accomplish the same effect with color or grayscale.

This is getting pretty close to the final branding. After tweaking the rocket for the full color version, I decided that the black and white version needed to match for cohesiveness.  I’m pretty satisfied with the result. It accomplished all of the things we were looking for. The full color version on the white background needs some color help, but we may end up favoring the reverse logo anyways.

We decided the logo needed a little warmer color–overall it was looking a little too cold.  I also added a few highlights on the ship to make it appear a little shinier.