If you’ve been to CourseCraft this week, you’ll notice that we have a bit of a new look! We changed the logo, the colours, and the style of the buttons. Working on CourseCraft this year has taught me so many things. I always thought I had some design talent. I can make a mean wedding invite, I’ve been through a million Illustrator and Photoshop tutorials and I’m always trying to learn new things. But you know what? Turns out designing a whole web app is a bit different than some floral party invites. The design process has been a constant struggle for me. Not to say it hasn’t been fun, because it has! I’m learning new things everyday. But I feel like a lot of what I do is trial and error and learning by doing.
I thought you might want to see my process for designing the new CourseCraft logo. I recently took an amazing course at Alt for Everyone taught by Laurie Smithwick. She walked us through her process for creating a logo from scratch and I borrowed a lot of her techniques. I don’t claim to be an expert, but here ya go!
Sketching is the first obvious step… you might think. But it’s not where I started. As per Laurie’s amazing advice, I took a few minutes (literally) to browse Logo Pond to find logos I liked. I scrolled around and makd quick judgements. If something caught me eye, I quickly took a screen shot. Once I had about 10 logos collected, I put them all in front of me at once. Then I took a closer look at each one and tried to put it into words why liked it. I came up with a list of words and right away started noticing a pattern.
These are the phrases that were most common:
- simple
- line drawing
- two tone
- soft
- low contrast
- square
- logo on top, name on the bottom
Then I set that list aside and went to work on another list of words. I wrote down words that (to me) described CourseCraft or what I wanted CourseCraft to be. These were a little harder to come up with and kind of abstract:
- tools
- bringing people together
- school
- teacher/student
- learning
- growing
- sharing
- books
- building blocks
Ok now let’s get to the sketching! With those 2 lists in mind, I started drawing. The kind of drawing where you just put down on paper anything that pops into your head with no erasing. If I liked something I tried to build on it and come up with more iterations. After a few days (yes days) of slow sketching I had this.
And this.
What did I do next? You’ll have to come back next week to find out! I’ll show you how I went from these rough, ugly sketches to the new CourseCraft logo.
