I began looking at other Design sites for inspiration and to see the fresh and new styles on the web. Dan and I also did research on local design firms and other freelancers in the area to examine how they were branding themselves.
After sifting through websites logos and ideas of our own, Dan and I settled on the idea of a lab beaker to go with our new found name “Apt 2 Labs.” I began sketching with glyph and swish strokes to create the body and splashing liquid of the beaker.
The first sketches didn’t work out as much as we wanted because they were not inspiring either of us and didn’t represent our business well. We began to look else where for inspiration and found it in our back yard. The perfect mascots for our business were in our back yard, chipmunks and squirrels, not to mention the bird that lived in the overhang on our deck.
Sketching out side is refreshing especially since I don’t get to be outside much being chained to my computer as a designer. While sketching the creatures in our back yard they turned into cartoons on paper. Here is an example of the first logo, Squirrel Beta:
As you can see, it is very flat and uninteresting, and something about the color is not quite right. Instead of burning myself out on the design of the squirrel all at once, I decided to take a break and move on to the next element of the design.
The initial plan was to change the banner on each page to let the squirrel interact with the individual page titles. Since the site design was going to be simple and minimal, the changing banner was designed to keep the user interested and at the site longer. The theory was that if they see different headers on the pages then they would click through the entire site to see what the squirrel was doing on each page.
Above you can see that the second set of squirrels look much better than the first due to the change in color and shape of his body. For the final business logo we chose to have the sneaky squirrel trying to run off with the 2 in our name and other various computer accessories. Everyone loves our logo, it’s the first thing they comment us on, besides, who could resist a cute squirrel even if he is running off with part of your name!
What inspires you to create a new design?
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