Project 2 Reflection

I came up with the idea for my logo through simple thinking. I believe an effective logo comes with a very minimalist attitude in designing, and I believe that is reflected in my logo. I thought of gaming sites, which often have logos that are something simple like a D-Pad or a joystick, so I went with buttons. It's memorable, simple, and doesn't require tons of colors and effects.

The most evident design principles are shapes and use of color (or lack thereof). The D-Pad was not a premade shape. I actually constructed a very realistic looking D-Pad using various shapes within the main plus shape and effects on these shapes. The effects are so effective (no pun intended) that if you remove them, it actually looks like there's nothing there. I also used an effect on one of the buttons to make it look like it was being pressed down on. There is also a lack of color, save for where it is most needed, in order to stand out in stark contrast from the rest of the logo. With that simple strategy I can make what needs to be noticeable very obvious, without using dumb flashy colors and effects all over the place.

Vector and bitmap images hardly affected my design. Bitmap or not it would likely look the same. It had a very minuscule role in assuring that my sizes didn't look a hint blurrier than it should have, but the sizes are small enough that there would have been no difference. I'm sure that if you removed the vector mask from all of my layers, the logo would look identical. There's nothing in my logo that would look different had it been done with bitmap images.

My vision was simple; make the D-Pad and buttons, and make one of the buttons look as though it was being pressed down on. Around the redesign period, I started making some changes. I realized that the effects on the text looked overdone and it didn't make any sense considering that the logo was supposed to look simple. Second, the mashing effect on the D-Pad was really bad. By my first draft, the mashing effect had already been fixed, but only within the last few moments of the period. I also had a ton of effects on every shape that looked extremely amateurish, and it turns out that without them, my logo looked much better. With everything toned down to look more professional, however, it was very boring. So the biggest change (albeit quite a subtle one) at the redesign period was my decision to use Photoshop's extensive custom brush options to create a brush effect that would add to the two most important elements of my logo, these being the mash effect and the text. So after a ton of testing, I found some good brushes and made it look good. Truth be told it is not a massive difference, but I think it does increase the overall quality of the logo by a lot.