Harri Larkin - Logo Development

Harri liked the new design, but requested the lettering be a bit thicker, and wanted to see it different colours in the same way the red and black was combined.

Increasing the thickness of the lettering does make the words stand out more, but the colours don't really do much for the logo as it overcomplicates it even further than the texture, which I wouldn't use.

 

 

Harri was really happy with these, and wanted to keep them all to decide which one to use after discussing them with the rest of the band.

Harri Larkin - Logo Development

I started by varying the brushes and line widths of all the vector lines within the logo, and found the limits of the extreme grunginess where the text was still readable and the minimal grunginess that was still noticeably not clean.

I decided to stick with the less grungy one because from my side of the design process I felt it important to champion the readability of the text. I used a textured background to make the logo grungier without hindering the readability further, as well as developing a red and black version of the two possible logos as the band have had difficulties deciding between the two colours.

Knowing that they've been having a difficult time deciding on the colour, I told them first to decide which row they prefer, because then I can talk about colour within the set and the potential advantages and disadvantages of each one.

My favourite is the below one however, as the high contrast makes the crown and text as visible as possible, as well as it having a more powerful feeling to it which gets saturated somewhat with the red.

I'm waiting to hear back from the band before doing anything else.

Harri Larkin - Stickers

I received these photo's earlier from Harri, who thanked me for the time and effort I'd put into the stickers. 

 


She also asked if I wouldn't mind spending a bit more time on the logo as she was more impressed with my ideas than the ones from the album artworker. In return she offered to send some money back for me with our mutual friend at Christmas. This was something I accepted straight away, as they're clearly pleased with my work and I thought it a good idea to establish a good working relationship with them as it could lead to further paid work in the future either with them or others from Bristol Institute of Modern Music.

She wanted the logo to look a bit grungier, sending me the below photo of an example. While this is very doable, finding a balance between the desired effect and retaining the legibility of the letters may be quite difficult.

Harri Larkin - Logo Mock-Up and Stickers

The description I received was that they wanted a chess piece as the symbol, and the text to say either the full band name or just the letters HL. Based on their further guidance I produced the ideas sheet shown below. 

I chose a knight as the piece to use because it's arguably the most illustrative of all the chess pieces and is asymmetrical, which makes it more of a symbol and less of a badge. 

Whilst it followed their instructions it ended up looking very corporate and clearly wasn't suitable for a band at all, especially given that they really like The Ramones logo, which is very different to the above mock-ups.

It was a bit frustrating that their guidance led in the complete opposite direction to where they actually wanted to go, so I told them to leave it with me a couple of days and I'd send them something back that was more suitable. I rang my friend to tell her I'd had some ideas and asked if her housemate was available to talk about them. I sent the below screenshot to my friend and started talking to Harri, the lead singer of the band via text message.

I used the knight symbol in a badge-like design that's clearly been influenced by The Ramones logo to make it more suitable for the band. I also used a symbol for the queen in chess as well, as it draws less comparisons with banks than the horse and so feels less corporate. I tried to use more whitespace to try and keep it slightly more feminine than The Ramones logo though.

Unfortunately by this point the person who's doing the artwork for the band's first album had offered to do a logo as well, but Harri liked these a lot and asked if she could use them as stickers, and potentially as the logo if she and the band liked them more than the other proposed logo.

Harri particularly liked the top right one and asked to see how it'd look in two colours, black and a dark red. I feel it looses something when in two colours, as shown below.



To try and avoid the band picking one that was sub-par I did the below variations too, which I think all look better than the 2 colour ones.



I set up the ones they wanted to use for stickers in the way for them with bleed and crop marks as the website they were using required as Harri wasn't comfortable doing it herself.