On Logos

Over the weekend I set out to make a logo for my site. Perhaps not the final one, but at least something that I won’t be completely ashamed of. I’ve made logos a few times before, and in the cases I have I typically approach it by taking the name of the site and seeing how I can make a logo out of it. So in the case of Scotchel, I just dumped the word into Photoshop and stared at it for a while. I thought about the things I wanted to convey about the site, how I want people to find love, go on dates, how it’s easy to use, and friendly. I looked for parts of Scotchel that would lend themselves well to additional images. Ways I could restructure the word to get additional meanings out of it. Anything I could think of to add onto it.

After a while I realized that the upper curve of the S in Scotchel looks a lot like half of a heart. And that’s what started my iterations on the logo:

Iterations of the logo for Scotchel.com.

For anyone that’s even halfway familiar with Photoshop these weren’t hard to come up with. The basic style is just taking the S, flipping it horizontally, changing the color, and erasing the part of the S I didn’t want. And shazam! We have a heart.

As I worked through different iterations I realized that the serif fonts didn’t convey a sense of friendliness. They conveyed a sense of formalness. Not what I wanted. So I gradually started moving to more sans-serif fonts. When I got to about the fifth font I realized that I really liked the handwritten fonts a lot. I didn’t have many on my system though, so I hit up Urban Fonts and started browsing through their directory of fonts. It was actually quite hard to find a handwritten font that had an S with a curve that could be used for a symmetrical heart. But, after a bunch of tries, I landed on one I liked.

I finally tried a few different things with the heart on the S, though I only kept the filled in heart and the half-black/half-red heart. When I was satisfied that I had found a logo I liked I ran them past Rachel for her review. She really liked the first one and the second to last one. Personally I really liked the very last one because it was still easy to read the word but you could see the heart pretty clearly. Rachel agreed with my premise and we ended up going with the very last one, for now