I was approached by another Graphic Designer “Okee”, to develop a logo for him. Okee specializes in original designs for products, mostly t-shirts and occasionally commission digital artwork and has several products featured in online stores. Being a very unique and original individual and an artist himself, Okee wanted a logo that suited not only his original design style but that reflected his personality as well.

After looking over a lot of his work, and working through a few sketches I came back to him with a basic concept and then I presented him with digital version with 2 variations of the same design concept in black and white and 3 different spot colors. Initially I thought he would choose a particular one and a color variant, but he liked the overall unity of the designs so much he decided to use both logos and to use the various colors as needed. Talk about original!

I was actually quite surprised (but happy) with how taken he was with the overall finished work.
That is in fact the reaction I think all designers would like to have from a client.
Below is the finished logo concept and its variants as I presented it to Okee.

Roberto Blake | Logo Design | Okee

Okee Logo Design Process

When I designed his logo I made sure to follow some basic tenants of logo design that a lot of graphic designers forget or are even unaware exist. You would be surprised how often this tends to happen.

The logo was developed in “vector format” to ensure that the logo was scalable and easily reproduced. You always want to develop logo’s in something like Illustrator or even InDesign, Corel Draw, or Macromedia Freehand. The quality is something you just can’t match in a raster based program like Photoshop. You should also always export logos as EPS files for clients.

I made sure that the logo could work with out color, I started in black and white and then branched into my individual spot colors. I also was very careful about choosing my fonts. Some fonts are more scalable and readable than others, and I always try to keep that in mind during the logo design process.

To ensure it was both describable and memorable I felt the need to reach into the past. Logos should always have a sense of familiarity to them while being unique. I decided this one needed a touch of art history somehow since it was after all for a fellow artist. I thought back to something that has always stuck with me since college; “Piet Mondrian”.

Piet Mondrian is a historical designer from the late 1800′s. He developed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colors. This helped me in not only determing the spot colors for the presentation, but also the overall concept that I wanted to unify with the font. I had sketch some blocks for guides around my original designs and decided based on Mondrian to incorporate them into the logo proper. The end result was what you see.

Ultimately I had a great experience working on this project and Okee has approached about future, and possible collaborations.

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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