Project #2-Elite Logo

For my second project I created a series of logos for the Elite Swim Club, my club swim team, that might be used on our team shirts in the years to come.  At the outset of the project I e-mailed my head coach who is also the president of the team.  He sent me back some feedback on what he was looking for (some of them are: he wanted the colors to remain the same, and he wanted me to incorporate the meaning of the word Elite into the logo) and the current and past logos that he had been using.  I then began to sketch out my ideas (pictured below).  

I then ran them by him along with one of the assistant coaches and they gave me some direction on what they were looking for as well as the go ahead to begin the project.  I then began to start on my computer generated versions.  I planned on designing 3 logos with a few versions on the computer using Adobe Illustrator.

The first logo is a little simpler than the other 2.  It is the word Elite and in front of it is a wave with a swimmer moving from left to right.  That is important because my coach is always using the word Elite as a highly trained group of individuals that are moving forward toward accomplishing great things.  That is why in each logo the word Elite is in italic and in this case the swimmer is moving to the right.  To create the swimmer, I used a simple swimmer tutorial that I found online and tried to improve it in a few ways.

I then created another version of this logo.  This time instead I used a different swimmer, but I couldn't find any tutorials on line so I had to turn to a new plan.  Instead I found a website, swimgraphics.com, that has many pages of all swimming clip art.  I brought one of those images into illustrator where I used the live trace tool and expanded it-creating a vector image.  I was then able to edit the color, size, placement, and more of the image until I like how it looked.  I wanted to go for more of a silhouette that was harder to pick out.

The third version had just the word elite and the wave with no swimmer.  All the versions are below.

The second logo is a traditional circle logo.  Before designing this logo I looked up some examples of circular logos that I liked (two of them are pictured below).

For this logo there there is just one version.  This logo has the wave and swimmer that I designed from the first logo but now we have a few circles around them.  Behind that I put the wave object from the old logo just to see what it would look like (I can always remove it after I meet with my coach).  The final product is below.

Example of shield logo that I liked

The third and final logo was a shield design.   When I searched logos on line, there were a bunch of shields displayed, so that gave me the idea.  Plus when looking at teams logos on the pool deck, you see a lot of circles or plain words, but no shields, so I thought it would be a good idea to try a shield logo.  I first had to create the shield which I did through this tutorial.  On this logo I really wanted the word Elite to be big and stand out with swim club and the date of establishment small under it.  I then added the swimmer.  Once again I elected to use the live trace tool, but this time with a different image.  In this case I didn't like the water with the swimmer, so I deleted the water from his and added the water from another image.  This took some time because you had to add and remove bits and pieces until it looked like he was swimming in it.  I am not to sure how I feel about the white background, but I can always go back to that later on.

I plan to sit down with my coach over break and discuss with him the logos that I have designed over the break.  Then I plan to ask a few of the assistant coaches as well as my teammates for feedback.  Once I come back from break I will make the changes and bring back the revisions that I have made.

As of right now I am very pleased with how the logos turned out.  My favorite has to be the first one.  It is simple but I like the meaning behind the swimmer that doesn't stand out as much and the font being in italics showing progression.

Project #1-Game Day Magazine

For my first project I wanted to create a magazine cover, similar to Sports Illustrated or game day magazine that would be handed out prior to the game.  Except I would be using pictures of MHS athleates as the focus.  I did some research about magazine covers and some good qualities that they have, and I want to try and include them into my project.  I also found some tutorials that would be interesting to include in my project.  This project doesn't have any real specifications because it is not being printed for anybody it is more of a warm up project.  However, I did make it a traditional magazine cover size: 8.5x11 inches.  When first brainstorming I wanted it to look like the picture to the right.

Below are two of my sketches that I designed for the magazine.  I was only able to develop these sketches after attending a couple games to get pictures that I could use.  

My title is "Colonial Turf," which ties in the school mascot and the fact that it is the first year of the turf field.  I ended up taking 350+ pictures from the games I attended.  I then had to go through the pictures and find the best ones.  There were a few I really liked, so they were the ones that are on the sketches and on my computer versions.

Image once done with Photoshop

I then began to work on the computer and work in photoshop to start.  I edited and cropped the pictures, as well as created my film strips from a tutorial.  From this I actually decided to combine some qualities from both my sketches into my one computer version.  I tried to include parts of a tutorial for a sports poster, but I didn't like how it turned out so I took it out and made changes accordingly to the pictures.  I also followed a bar code tutorial to make the barcode in the bottom right hand corner.

Once finishing in photoshop, I saved my image and brought it into illustrator.  In illustrator, I added the text to my project, and it was basically done from there.  I didn't get any feedback from an outside source, but I did make revisions throughout from what I saw and like or didn't like about my project.  

In the end, I was pleased with how my project turned out-the final product is you see below.

Project Ideas

1.     Sport Cards for MHS Sports-This project could also be combined with a photo class or I could go to the games and get the pictures myself.  Then I could play around with the background, borders, etc.

2.     Create a logo for my swim team-I could redo my swim teams logo, run it by my coach, and then possibly add it to clothes later on.

3.     Magazine Cover-For this I would re-create a Sports Illustrated cover except I could make a MHS eddition.

4.     Calander-For pictures, I would go around MHS and capture pictures from around the school, sporting events, etc.  Then for each month have a different theme and create a collage with them.  This could be possibly used as a fundraiser.

5.     Sports Jerseys/Patches-I could create logos for sports championship events.  For example All Star game jerseys or World Series/Super Bowl logo patches.