#logo development

Took a foray into logo design and decided to surprise my roommate with a logo for the website she's making for her ttrpg Prima-Materia. it's been a long time coming and I'm happy to have been part of the creation process for the past 3 years, every day she gets closer to releasing the game and her world building and ideas have been so fun and interesting to listen to, I have several years worth of memes i'll be able to make once she releases it!

thinking about brand images .. . learning more about logos & fancy illustrator techniques ...

Little did you know, I love to answer questions about ~design~.

The Ingress logo has gone through about 3 different official versions, but at least 50 different conceptual iterations. I'm a graphic designer by trade and profession, so I approached it any other way I would approach making a logo.

The first iteration of the logo I have less information on the development of, but I was looking at a lot of advertising from the late 1800s to early 1900s. For example, these advertisements have a lot flourishes on the text and warping letters, as was common in that era.

I took that concept and made the first iteration of the ingress logo at the comic's inception in 2017. My graphic design skills weren't as strong then, and I mostly just took a font I thought fit and slapped it around a little bit to try and get the look I wanted.

I wasn't particularly happy with how this one turned out, and it only ended up being used for a few months on the first version of the website and on a single printing of the first chapter of the comic, but I also didn't put a ton of time and energy into making this one. So, I went back to the drawing board soon after I made this first one.

The second iteration of the logo took a lot of inspiration from the same sources, but I first took a lot of time drawing out concepts in my sketchbook to try and get the right visual look for how the logo should be.

At first I played with the idea of including a little picture along with the logo. I thought maybe Toivo's glasses would be a good thing to try to include in the 'g' in Ingress, or that Rocky or Toivo's hat should appear in the logo. These were all discarded for cluttering up the logo, because the words themselves are all pretty long. Eventually, I started playing with the shape of the word itself, which very quickly lead to the last S becoming the signature swirl.

Next was iterating on this concept with fonts.

That lead to the second iteration of the logo, and the longest running version of it.

I chose a textured font to give it that "worn" feeling that was so popular in the design world in 2018. There were a ton of brands doing textured stuff to give their brand an edgy feel, but I did it to make it feel old and like it was from the late 1800s.

This would still be the logo today, but I ran into a problem: the font I used, Goldsmith Vintage, had a limitation on how long you could use their font for free and for printing. Fonts aren't particularly expensive, but if you want to use a font for publishing, you need a special license and those fees can rack up in price pretty quickly. It was unlikely that the people who made the font would come after me for using it, but I decided to not take that chance and instead refresh the logo one more time, this time putting more of my own hand in it.

This time, I took a different approach. I liked the old logo, but I was having a hard time finding a font that I really liked and would get the same feeling as the old logo... So instead, I decided to use calligraphy to draw it myself.

I rewrote the word Ingress Over and Over and Over, and specifically I rewrote the S's to try and get the perfect shape of it. Then, I picked out specific letters that I liked.

From those letters, I picked the ones I thought looked best, and smashed them together into one rough version of the logo that I liked.

And then from here, I made a digital version of the logo in Adobe Illustrator so I could get a nice crisp vector version. Also, I made rough versions of it, so I could keep doing the same 'old' look.

And... that's about it!

Ultimately, I think the new one is really fun, and I really like the fact that the latest one was made with my hand directly. Those aren't letters you can find in any font, they're my letters.

Maybe you can tell but, I have a lot of opinions on letter shapes.