The Dark Prince

I’m writing this partially because I’m in a mood for updating things and partially because this was done over a month ago and I didn’t report on it at the time. Whilst going over some details of a project with a certain talented programmer, I managed to draw out a fairly decent idea of what I wanted in my logo. Here it is (well the first word anyway):

It’s a bit crooked, but you get the idea. When I next get the mood I’ll try and use those bastard paths in photoshop to make it a bit cleaner, damn my shaky hands.

Welcome back to an exciting and rather self centred thingo where I babble on and slowly create my logo and show just how terrible I am with various graphic tools! It should be a veritable treat for everyone who is me.

First off, what do I want in a logo? Well I’m glad you took the time to ask that and didn’t force me to pretend that you did. I’m looking for the following features:

• A non-standard font and very obviously so, something that clearly has each letter designed carefully,
• Should be more symbol like at a glance, but easily readable when examined.
• A sharpish, edge like look, each letter should be pointy (both in 2D and the possible 3D render)
• Should be very curvy with points wherever possible

Armed with these ideas, I did what any professional design person does. I made a few sketches. Unfortunately, I’m not a professional designer and my hands are rather shaky, so my sketches were pretty horrible, but the ideas did start flowing. So my devoted readers, if you ever feel like making a logo, try sketching, even if you can’t draw a straight line, at least it will get the ideas going.

This was my first attempt. It’s horrible, I didn’t even bother with the rest of the letters, the style is okay, but the curves are all wrong and it just looks boring. But it’s a start, and all things start somewhere, except a circle. Or a square. Or any joined curve. Or plane.

A slight improvement on the T, but went quickly downhill as it went. Rather like this entry. This was the point when I just decided to concentrate on the “The”, it being 1/3 of the logo (or technically 3/13).

“Perhaps the curves look shit?”, I said to myself in a comic sort of voice. “Maybe I should try something different”, says the genius inventor. So I tried to keep everything pointy but remove the curves. Tim Burton would like it, but I don’t. Oh well, maybe next time.

So, back to the curvy bits, and overlapping letters and it’s starting to take shape now. I rather like the start of this, but things need to be fixed here and there. The overlapping is going to stuff up any chance of a straight silhouette, and the T is a bit wrong here and there. Still it’s a start. The thing is, a good (or crap writer, depending on the opinion), always leaves the audience hanging for more.

Well, my progress in the land of programming has gone so well recently that the secret goal I set out for myself just over a week ago was achieved and a fair bit more. So what next for me? Well, firstly I have to sound all self important on a page that nobody reads. Then I plan on making claims about being the best programmer in the world. Finally, I plan on making a retraction of all things written here with some poor attempt at wisdom such as, “I have grown as a person and learnt that perhaps my private life does not belong in a blog”, or perhaps “Writing a blog is like totally uncool now because everyone does it and like, it’s totally stupid and so ghey”.

Anyway, this entry wasn’t about mocking those that write pointless, badly structured and uninteresting posts about their stupid and pointless lives in internet lingo, it is about launching this very new and very exciting section of this very cool and exciting place. In a bit of an effort to get things a little less…plain…here I vow here and now to try and build up a decent professional logo for this and other endeavors. This will ideally include a 2 dimensional outline of the logo and a full 3D render, which unfortunately means learning how to use 3D Studio Max, which really isn’t that hard but I still put it off anyway.

So, hopefully this will be interesting reading, or at least force me to do something about the rather poor presentation of this site. Enjoy, (err…the newer entries on what I’m actually doing that is..)