Louise Fili

With this project, I found myself faced with a fairly daunting task: to design a logo for an established designer or typographer. I began researching from the list provided to the class and found Louise Fili. I loved her work form the beginning with its vintage and fanciful feel. I explored her website, taking in her work and her style to help me figure out which aspects to mimic in the logo design. Next, I started locating more decorative fonts from 1001freefonts.com to use for the logo. I exhausted my font library and headed to the internet to find more because I had yet to find the right font. Once I gathered several fonts, I began to narrow down which fonts I did not like. I played with color and arrangement of text as containers and embellishments came into play.

I settled on a deep purple and a deep green as the colors for the logo as Louise commonly used these colors in her package designs. Little Lord Fontleroy NF became the chosen font as it had vintage and an art deco feel to it that is so prominent in Louise's work.

I liked the font with an ellipse around it in the two colors, however, I knew that the logo need a little something more. So I looked into the Adobe Illustrator symbols and found this florids vector pack. I took one of the symbols and modified it by only using a select part of the symbol. I did this later on for the bio poster as well when I wanted some sort of curly embellishment, but I wanted the smoothness and symmetry not available with a hand-drawn embellishment.


Now that I had a completed logo, I began gathering information for a biography page on Louise Fili. Outside of her own webpage, I had difficulty finding diverse information on her. What helped most was the Women of Design book that Evelyn brought to class. In that book, there was an interview that helped me understand her own influences and process.

With this poster, I tried creating the background image first and then adding the logo, picture, and text. This did not work very well as I soon found out, so I started over and typed out the information and then created the design around the text. Another difficulty with this bio page had to be the fact that Louise did not design posters. She designed book covers and packaging/identities for restaurants and food companies. Louise did design several books, so I looked into the layouts of the text and images in the books to help me figure out how to create the bio page. I created the border from a piece of one of the symbols in the florids pack to mimic her use of borders and containers. I played around with the placement of the type on the page and added the dotted line border when I had to shrink my type down because the font was too large. This left a lot of empty space that needed to be filled somehow, hence the dotted line to fill space while acting as a container for the type. This is the finished product:

Finito!

Following this post are the three finished products of this project. I thoroughly enjoyed designing and creating book covers for this project, even though it was very time consuming. The project seemed like it would go on for a good while without ceasing even as we worked on it. I worry about some of the type, specifically Taming of the Shrew, and whether or not it reads as shrew or not. Other than that, I am pretty happy with the results of this project.

Organized Chaos

Once I had decided upon design ideas for the book covers, I began the process of actually creating the covers. I went to Hobby Lobby to buy some paper and things and probably went a little overboard. As I realized that I had too many ideas of what I could do, I began to cut down and focus on the essential aspects of the designs. I wanted to create a vintage feel to the books, while keeping with the modern look. To create the sense of a series of books, I kept all the back cover and spine layouts the same while I modified the front imagery, text, and overall colors to make each book unique. With all of the individual letters, I hand cut them with an X-Acto knife so that I did not have a background. I had fun using vellum paper in varying colors to add a sense of depth to the covers so that they were not all flat colors.

     Here are some examples of the covers as they were during the process:

As I continued on with the project, I spread out all my stuff as usual, and had a very messy workspace. This picture is only a small portion of the messiness, but messy workspaces are what I need. 

Modern Shakespeare

As soon as I learned that our class was to create modern book covers for Shakespearean plays, I grew instantly excited. I knew that my scrapbooking skills would come in handy, as well as help me create effective book covers. I gravitated towards the two Shakespearean plays that I had already read (Othello and King Lear) and chose Taming of the Shrew because of the movie 10 Things I Hate About You. A silly reason, I know, but I at least had an idea of the plot of the play.

Once I decided upon which plays to create the covers for, I started sketching out some ideas for the covers using the symbolism embedded in the stories. My favorite quote from Othello is the quote on the back of the cover. I wanted to take the imagery associated with that quote and use that for the front cover. The play of Othello centers on the character Othello and how his love turns to jealousy very quickly and ends in violence for all included. With Taming of the Shrew, I played around with ideas of a woman in chains or marriage, and eventually thought of drawing an actual shrew and having a chained tied to it to symbolize the constricting bonds of marriage in the play. For King Lear, I took the idea of King Lear splitting his kingdom into three, and how that was supposed to be the best solution for the kingdom.

At this point in time, I didn't realize how small one half of an inch was...Needless to say the spines were changed around a bit...

Westerville Music and Arts Festival

Our second project instructed the class to create and identity for the annual Westerville Music and Arts Festival. We needed to make a logo, poster and t-shirt design that highlighted the fine arts side of the festival, while still display the other aspects of the festival. I began with a few sketches of random things associated with music and with arts separately, such as different instruments, staffs, music notes, and paint brushes, paint, palettes, and other such things. I struggled putting the two subjects together, but eventually created three different logo possibilities.

 

The first option had several elements that I liked such as the red box working as a container and a text, but I felt like the logo still needed work with all the extra negative space and how the "Westerville Area Chamber of Commerce" stuck out and did not flow with the rest of the logo. the second and third options had more promise, but I decided upon the second option. I changed a few elements after I scanned the image in by taking the idea of a container holding the text from the first logo and making the logo only have two fonts instead of three. 

This logo uses a hand drawn font for the word "Arts" and Century Gothic for the other words. The sans serif, more streamlined font of Century Gothic helped provide contrast  for "Arts", allowing it to stand out as the most important elements of the logo and the festival itself. I chose the colors for their brightness and contrast against each other. Combined with the brown of the background, the three colors provide a warm, fun, summer feel that embodies the time and purpose of the festival. I then created a black and white version of the logo to cater to the needs of the client.

Now that the logo was done, I could move on to the poster and t-shirt designs. After throwing out a first attempt at a poster, I reverted back to one of the first sketches I'd done for the project, which looked more like poster designs than logos anyway. This design feature half of an instrument and half of a paint palette. I adapted that to fit the paintbrush and violin of my logo. I kept the design for the poster fairly simple and used a serif font Baskerville Old Face to provide contrast against the Century Gothic font of the rest of the poster.

I was not sure how to tackle the t-shirt design at first seeing as I had several options. I could have used my logo and simply added the extra bits of information needed, or I could take parts of the logo, or use more of the poster design. I ended up deciding on using the text from the logo and add the rest of the information using Century Gothic once again. I made the text white with the turquoise color as a possible t-shirt color. The client wanted bright colors and this color would be perfect for standing out in a crowd. The design could also be placed on a tye-dye shirt as the client wanted, with the font in the white to contrast the tye-dye.

Overall, I am pretty pleased with the end results of the project. I think I have successfully highlighted the arts aspect of the festival as well as the fun feel of the event.

The Finished Product

So here is the finished product! After many hours of labor, I am pretty proud of this piece. I think I conveyed my original idea of a jazzy, fun composition even without color. Even as my pen began to ran out of ink, I anticipated finishing this project and having something I really liked.

The Middle Step

This next step was the most painstaking and time consuming of all the steps. I chose two fonts, one a thicker, bubblier font, and another thinner, straight font. I wanted the chorus to be the larger letters as I felt that the chorus conveyed the core of the song the best. After I figured out how to have the letters form the shapes of my original sketch, I began tracing each letter from a printout of the fonts.

Once I finished tracing everything, I photocopied the tracing so I could do a ghost transfer. When I had completed the transfer, the inking began.