So, after our dabble on the rather random side with our cartoon dog selves making an appearance. Sadly, The Hamildug, the Bishdug and the Moodug will not be making a return appearance.
So we returned to Roberts designs, and I took a simple cornered area, along with a modern font (GeoSansLight), and incorporated his drawings.
Using a simple black background, and gold foreground colour, I imagined this type of design being gold foil on business cards, which I thought could look quite classy. The dog peeking round the corner looks good, I liked keeping the unbalanced nature of the original design with the name poking out of the retaining border and the dog taking one end of the logo all to himself. However, in negative the eyes of the dog suddenly seem cold and dead . . . the cold dead eyes of a killer . . . or maybe that’s just my imagination running away with me.
Second up.
The same effect throughout all the designs today, this cheeky little scamp is more central and far more balanced. However I’m already becoming concerned that the gold looks bland on screen, while it might look wonderful embossed on a card, here it just looks tan.
Third up.
This scruffy little blighter looks pretty good, but keeping a single colour means that the text is difficult to read even though I’ve added a significant border around it.
So I changed the image of the dog to just it’s outline.
Which looks okay, but is indistinct and difficult to see at small sizes (like a business card or on a mobile phone screen).
So, returning to the first version, I changed the text to a gold effect gradient.
Which makes it stand out, but it still looks a little bland.
So I went back to the first two images, and added various metal effect gradients through them to see how they would work.
I added pupils to the eyes on the one above, to avoid the cold dead eyes thing, but now he looks frightened, and with smaller pupils he looked high.
Showing these to my partners, they liked the direction I was going it, but felt that the black and gold didn’t work particularly well, and that I should see other gradients, and should exclusively stick with the gold.
Catherine also wanted a more bright image, so wanted to see the variants over a white background.
We’re getting close, only a few more iterations until we get concordance.
More tomorrow.