My very first idea when thinking about a personal logo was something to do with butterflies. I've had a thing for butterflies/fairies since I was in grade school. So I started with a butterfly and thought maybe about doing my name in the design of the butterfly's wings. I dismissed that idea pretty quickly; I thought it was too detailed, I don't have that kind of artistic skill, and it just didn't feel right.
So instead, I went with the online moniker I've been using for a while now: crabbybun. I created this as a combination of my Western & Chinese zodiacs - I am a Cancer (the crab) in the West, and I was born in the Year of the Rabbit for the Chinese. I briefly thought about somehow combining the crab and the rabbit but that looked scary in my mind so I decided against it. I began working with somehow putting the "c" and "b" from the two parts of my name into an animal. I'm not fond of the crab, but I do like bunnies an awful lot. So I have a good many sketches trying that out.
As you can tell, I couldn't quite get it right. I just couldn't make the letters look good in the bunny. Then I thought about something I've been trying to do for a while. See, I have the symbol for my zodiac (essentially a sideways 69) tattooed on my right wrist. I've been toying with the idea for a couple of years now of embellishing this tattoo, since it's pretty simple and done just in black. I've been thinking about getting little bunny details tattooed in black around my zodiac, to represent the crabbybun idea. I've been waiting to see how a tattoo artist would do it, because I'm not talented enough to really do what I want. But I decided to try my own version of it as my logo.
Took me a couple tries, but I figured out how I wanted it to look as a logo. It's simple, and easy enough to shrink down. It could certainly just be black & white, with stark outlines, but color was asked for. So I did the zodiac sign part of it with a gradient of water colors - aqua green into blue - because Cancer the Crab is a water sign. I outlined it with a sparkly gel pen, doing a circular pattern partly because it looked like ripples and partly because the pen worked better that way. I picked a sparkly gel pen because the glitter looks like light glistening on water. For the bunny part, I picked my favorite color - pink - and did those parts in shades of pink. I picked a pale pink for the body, and a darker pink for the ear/nose. I outlined this in pink glitter gel pen as well, because pink is pretty and glitter makes everything better.
I guess the most important thing I realized while making this logo is that letters are not really necessary for a logo. I automatically wanted to put lettering into the logo, thinking that it was important but the more I thought about it, I realized that a lot of really famous logos don't have letters at all - like Nike, that swoosh alone tells you what the product is. You don't need the name at all.
The videos were good. I think the Marmite one might be better than the other one. That one was actually interesting, because I've tried Marmite and I really don't know why the English eat that stuff. I knew that it was popular, but I never thought of it needing to change or "rebrand." The idea of a squeezable bottle was good - not original, but necessary - but I understood afterward how necessary a brand update can be for a product.
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