A Trip to LogoLand!

July 20, 2022

Today work continues on the logo for Bluebird and Turtle. Oh sorry, were you hoping for cute brick replicas of famous sites, fun rides and fair food? That’s LEGOLand! Which is also fun and exciting, but sadly not on the agenda today. Here in LOGOLand, I’m starting with some thumb-nail sketches to get a feel for possible options:

I’ve decided to go with the version of Bluebird riding on Turtle’s back. “Sweet pea”, a glass turtle we bought for my daughter, is acting as my initial model. She doesn’t move around much, being glass and all, so she’s a very willing subject!

Bluebird is proving a bit more elusive, but I’ll run her to ground later. I intend to vectorize the images in Adobe Illustrator, so I’ve kept the drawing pretty simple:

Now that turtle is sketched out, I can bring her into Illustrator to turn her into a vector image. Here she is, able to be size adjusted without pixelating! When she’s living her life as a logo, she has to be scaled down a lot to fit in the banner. That means she lost some detail (like her freckles) for clarity’s sake:

After making a few quick sketches of Eastern Bluebirds, I’ve chosen one to start with and am ready to bring it into Illustrator. It took hours of looking for just the right Bluebird to sketch. I finally decided to find one that was close enough to what I had in mind and modify it. I tried out a few different models, but here’s the one I went with:

If you’re like me and get paralyzed with the thought of starting a drawing, try limiting your drawing time to ten minutes. Knowing that I’m going to do a series of 10 minute sketches, and none of them can be perfect in that limited time, helps jumpstart the process for me. It also helps that I’m embracing the philosophy of “Wabi-Sabi” and cultivating an acceptance of the imperfect. Life at the moment won’t allow for any other approach, and I’m starting to appreciate all it has to offer! In the words of Robert Watson-Watt, “Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes.” In that spirit, here is my quick sketch of Bluebird, ready to vectorize:

Bluebird took her own journey through Illustrator. Here she is sporting her new look:

The theme I’m working with in WordPress only provides a small area for the logo in the banner, so I’m a bit constrained size and style-wise, however down the road I can play around with other versions of the logo, especially as we make our way into print materials. For now we’ve got a logo design that works: