My Team Logo 2

Inline Hockey Team, Komazawa NEXT Logo
30 May 2010

Komazawa NEXT is a team to enjoy playing hockey rather than to stick to the wins. Their strategy is well thought-out just like Odysseus' one during the Trojan War.

(Odysseus is a Greek king in Greek mythology. He is renowned for his intelligent attack. During the Trojan War, he made a wooden horse for the Greek to hide inside. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and later the Trojans found the horse. They pulled it into their city as a victory trophy and celebrated that night. When the Trojans started getting drunk, the Greek came out of the horse's belly and attacked the drunk Trojans.)

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Concept 1 (image 1 & 2)

The first concept is typography with a little icon of a bulb.
This logo is symmetric in its form. However, to give a dynamic feeling of potential hockey nature, both ends of 'NEXT' are enlarged like a fish-eye lens. 'KOMAZAWA' is placed along the top edge of 'NEXT'.

It will be made by vector art. They will be not too neatly lined up, but slightly moved like American old cartoon tytles' style such as the Popeye, the Pink panther, the Woody woodpecker, etc. The idea is not to make it look too serious as the team is more to have fun.

The bulb represents that this team plays based on its well-thought strategy. This will be kept very simple vector shape not to distract the team name.

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Concept 2 (image 3 & 4)

The other concept is a hockey mask with two sticks crossed each other. This kind of mask is rarely used now, but it could be a symbol of aggressiveness as it looks like a scull and reminds of Jason's mask.
Two sticks are cossed behind so that the mask looks more like a scull.

The colours used are red and brown. Red is aggressiveness, and brown is from Odysseus's winning icon, the Trojan Horse.

My Team Logo

Sport: Inline Hockey

Team Name: Komazawa NEXT (existing team that I belonged to)

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AGIdeas 2

Concept Evaluation

"Intelligence is remembering what you are interested in."

Michael Mabry is not only a graphic designer but also an illustrator.

He has dedicated his career to creating visual images that challenge the mind and touch the heart.

One of his clients includes The Land of Nod, kid's bedding and furniture store.

In the end of his talk at AGIdeas, he actually showed us how he created his illustrations.

The process was:

He starts working on computer first to decide the composition, and then draws some sketches.

Then brings them into computer and divide them into hundreds of layers.

To create a nice warm texture, he used paints, sand paper, sticky tapes, and many more things.

The outcomes appear like these:

Images from: http://www.michaelmabry.com/

Although he uses computer largely to create these images, the outcomes have very nice hand-drawn-like feeling. The images are very fun and lots of animals and insects appear, which kids definitely love. There are many tiny things hidden in his illustrations, so I found that makes people feel like taking a closer look at them. I remember I always felt happy to find tiny things behind the main characters on the story books when I was a kid.

I was very inspired with his works and I reconfirmed that I would love to be involved in these types of works in the future.

AGIdeas

Trends & Designers

Trend 1: Grotesque/Quirkiness

-Ghostpatrol-

Ghostpatrol is a Melbourne-based illustrator.

He's drawn many illustrations since he was a kid, and he keeps on drawing on his sketchbooks now as well. Some of them have very strong concepts behind, the others are just some sketches from his daily life.

Images from: http://ghostpatrol.net

His illustrations are very quirky, which I think is very interesting and stays in your mind strongly. Most of the kids in his works don't have any facial expressions at all and they often appear holding knives. They never be happy smiling faces, and I think this is a big trend in illustrations recently.

-Webuyyourkids-

Another example is Webuyyourkids, the sydney-based design team.

They were formed in 2005 by Sonny Day and Biddy Maroney.

"Computer Arts magazine described our work as "Harsh Majical" and "Fresh As Fish In Restaurant". We like to draw pictures about witchcraft, mishaps, misdemeanours, and voodoo."

http://www.webuyyourkids.com/site/about/

Sonny's inspirations are comic, skateboard, and Neckface, an American graffiti artist.

Biddy was inspired by the collections of his grandfather's (or father's?) 50's movie posters when she was a kid.

And they both like horror movies but artistic ones. I can see they give them a huge impact on thier works.

Images from: http://www.webuyyourkids.com/

Trend 2: Bold sans-serif

(International typographic style)

The other trend is International typographic style (also called Swiss style).

This trend has been seen for a few years, but I think it still works very well when the design has very strong concepts.

-Andreas Uebele-

Andreas Uebele is founder and director of the bisual communications agency Buro Uebele in Stuttgart. In recent years, his agency's sork has honoured with more than 240 national and international awards.

Images from: http://www.uebele.com/

-Dean Poole-

Here is another designer who uses International typographic style very well.

Dean Poole is a creative director at Alt Group in New Zealand.

His works are made in a very clever way. Among them, the works he has done for Hudson Gavin Martin gave the most strong impression on me.

Images from: http://www.hgmlegal.com/People.aspx

http://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen-maerkte/galerien/die-gewinner-des-red-dot-grand-prix-2009-796/2/corporate-design-hudson-gavin-martin.html