How I Designed a T-shirt

For this assignment, we were presented with three possibilities of client. I chose Burger Bank because it's an establishment I've had experience with. As well, it's suffered from some difficulties in the past and needs a bit of an image overhaul.


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The one thing I remembered from my childhood is their mini burgers, and how you could get four for a dollar back in the day. I thought that was pretty neat, and focused on that when I brainstormed for graphic ideas. I also thought they needed a logo of some sort, though I wasn't sure where I wanted to go with the design. I ultimately chose to stick closely to the original logo they'd established for themselves, leaving it to my own design to add interest.

I also played around with the idea of equating the Burger Bank to a blood bank, though that is admittedly not the most appetizing route to travel. There was also the really obvious idea of equating it to a bank that stores money.


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Feedback from my sketches led me to stick with the "bag of burgers" concept, though I added the mouth from another design to it to see how the two would go together. I played around with colors, though I mostly stuck with the earth tones and blue together. I wanted colors that would be fairly gender neutral. I decided to make my third design go down my other avenue, just to see if I could use a simple logo to communicate the point. I think that design is pretty boring and a standard shirt design you would see for businesses around here.

The final round of critiques helped me settle on the solid fill, since the sort of "deco" design wasn't quite clear enough. Someone also suggested that a hand-drawn logo would look best with my drawn art, and I fully agreed. I went back to my design and played with the colors a bit. I changed the lineart to a dark brown so that it didn't contrast quite so much with the other colors.



And here we are!

Critique of Various Illustrator Tutorials

The first tutorial I viewed was How to Design a Logotype from Conception to Completion. The title makes one believe the tutorial will be more indepth than it is. I do like how every concept of creation is covered, from sketching to management of the "corporate identity," and how a logo must be created for use in many mediums, as well as look good in simple black. However, all of these elements are simply touched on. The step by step instructions for Illustrator, along with the screenshots, are also very helpful. If one is looking for a quick and easy reference, this is the tutorial for you. If you don't have quite enough Illustrator knowledge or need to have more detailed directions, this one might be difficult for you.

The second was Design a Grungy Circular Logo. This one delivers exactly what it promises. Each step is simple and clearly illustrated with screenshots. It also very clearly explains a technique that seems easy to veterans of Illustrator, but completely stumps newbies. The only downsides in the tutorial are the links to stock sites. While those are very helpful, I feel that in logo design, one should be able to create their own graphics for the company identity. Right?

Lastly I explored Create a Silhouette Logo for a Steakhouse in Illustrator. I was immediately pleased with this tutorial because he expresses the fact that you should use your own material! See, I was totally right in my last paragraph, this guy says so. He explains how to use real reference materials to create pleasing logos in Illustrator. Each step is spelled out in clear and concise wording. However, being a visual person I would have liked a little more screenshot action on this one.