Logo Design: Do It Yourself Can Be Painful, But Satisfying

Published: May 1, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

No matter what you are doing, if you are trying to solve a problem, it is best sometimes to just let your mind wander. I find designing logos, which I have done a few times, challenging. It is a lot harder than it looks. And I really like doing it.

Why? A question I ask myself, and the world, hundreds of times a day.

When I decided to create Hardware Foundry, I wanted to do something clever. I do most of my best thinking in the shower in the morning. When I am trying to puzzle something out, I often think about it as I am going to sleep, and when I wake up, the problem has been percolating it my brain for a while. And because I am not quite awake yet and I still have some sort of fuzzy access to whatever my brain was doing the night before, it just seems that this time--around 8 am--is when I get my good--well, what I think are good, anyway--ideas. It helps that none of the yahoos in my house bother me in the shower, either. Ellie, my daughter, is on the way to school with my wife, Elizabeth, and Henry is usually watching Cyberchase on PBS. The sheepdog is waiting patiently for me by the front door to go out. It is a peaceful time.

So I was trying to puzzle out the Hardware Foundry logo, and I saw my crescent wrench twirling in my mind, and it spun around until it was standing upright, just like a capital Y.

Eureka!

What could be more appropriate than spelling letters with tools? I got out of the shower, and went over to the toolbox. I pulled out tools, looking for letter shapes. I was particularly proud of the capital R, which is the handle of a hacksaw. And I really liked the F, which is a vice, as you can see from the first pass of the logo below. I took pictures of the tools I had, and then me and the kids went up to Home Depot looking for more tools that we could shape into letters.

Hardware Foundry Logo, First Pass. Clever, but too shiny and too fuzzy at the same time.

I didn't get the contrast right in the different elements of the logo, and I couldn't get the lighting constant, but I still liked the logo. I showed it to my colleagues over at IT Jungle and a few other people, and they complained about this and that. But Dan Burger, who I hired because everyone needs someone to be the voice of reason, told me it sucked, that he didn't like it, and was very specific about how we should use some 1930s era, steelworkers union looking, commie image from a foundry. Hammers and fire and sweat and all that. And he just kept needling me about it. And while he was doing this, I was determined to make my idea work.

So I took a whole bunch of different pictures to make the letters, in a much brighter light setting. And I while I liked the colors better, I knew that I was in over my head to make this work. So, I called Beth, the graphic artist who did a lot of the logos my company, Guild Companies, have created and used over the years, and asked her if she could clean it up. She said she was busy, but she would give it a try.

Hardware Foundry Logo, Second Pass Pass. Still clever, and way shiny, but no. This isn't going to work.

A few hours later, I realized that Dan was right about the logo being wrong, and not necessarily for all the reasons he had pointed out, but for some of them. It wasn't simple enough. It wouldn't reproduce well on paper. It wouldn't scale to a small size well. It was too blurry, and it sent the wrong message. I called Beth back and said scratch that idea, and, I called Dan back. I can be sarcastic at times, particularly when someone criticizes my work. "You had to keep $#@!&&%*$# needling me, didn't you?" I said to Dan on the phone. "You couldn't just let me be happy." I went on like this for a few more sentences, and then said. "Well, you were absolutely right. It's the wrong logo." I thanked him for pushing me so hard, and explained that unlike many people in charge of a company, I actually listen when the people who work with me tell me something sucks, even if I don't want to believe them.

But the wrench stayed on my desk for a week or so, and I kept playing around with it. Like every other wrench I have ever seen, it says "DROP FORGED" on it. And I went to the Internet to look it up and see what that meant. Forging means a foundry, right? And everyone who has ever handled a wrench has seen that phrase, right? So I scanned the handle of the wrench into my PC, did a little cutting and pasting of elements of the wrench, bought a square looking font from Linotype for $32, and off I went. The shadowing on the lettering is done by typing a word three times--once in black, once in white, and once in dark gray. You offset the black a little to the left of the gray and the white a little to the right; to make the gray match the roughness of the metal, you grab the letters and put them through a gray noise filter. Voila!

Hardware Foundry Logo, Third Pass. Yes, the third time is a charm.

Intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally, I had to create the logo myself. So it all worked out for the best that the first two sucked and Beth was too busy to polish up my idea.

When I showed it to Dan this time, he said, "You are not going to believe this, but I actually like it!"

I explained that I didn't give a damn. I knew I was right.

He laughed at me, as he always does. That's why I keep him around. Plus, he works like hell every day.