If ever there was a classic example of a cartoon logo developed at the The Logo Factory, the project for Tek Op IT is it. Created for a California based IT company, the design for Tek Op (originally submitted as Nerd Squad) began as all our illustrative logos do – as a series of sketches and doodles, drawn by hand before so much as clicking on the Adobe Illustrator desktop icon. When it comes to cartoon-driven logos, the character is going to be pivotal to building the company brand, so it’s critical that initial sketches nail down the mascot personality before being finalizing digital artwork. Only by drawing these kinds of logos by hand can we infuse them with ‘life’ – cartoon characters created completely in software tend to have a mechanical appearance.
During the initial conceptual phase, our designers began envisioned the central character as a ‘bionic’ monkey – in keeping with the hi-tech nature of the company. Once we had settled on this direction for the character we needed to get his personality down pat, creating a series of character studies. Each featured different expressions that could be used in situational illustrations and graphics.
Once we had nailed down the personality of the monkey and his facial expressions, it was time to render the entire character into vector based artwork, using scanned versions of the original sketches to work from. Once that was completed, it was simply a matter of adding the company name and several design ‘flourishes’ to complete the mark.
This project began its life as a logo for Nerd Squad, but was changed mid-stride into Tek Op because of conflicting trademarks (you’d be surprised how many times this occurs mid way through logo design projects). After consulting with powers that be, the client settled on a new name – Tek Op – and we had to incorporate the new name into the artwork. We also took the opportunity to develop the character a little further, removing some extraneous detail from the illustration.
Vehicle wraps are becoming increasingly popular as companies try to find new ways to promote themselves using already available avenues – the company car for example. Using photo reference of the kind of vehicle owned by the client, we were able to visualize how we’d like the artwork to appear. Once finalized, we were able to reverse engineer the design into the appropriate vehicle wrap template and send the artwork off to be output. As all our logos and support artwork are in vector format, there’s no issue about resolution or scaling.
Using a similar style and graphic approach, our designers built a series of web icons for use in brochures, advertising and as navigation icons on the Tek Op website. As the icons depicted all the company services, we also incorporated them into a fairly slick flash animation.
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[...] line work and use of negative space. See, while a lot of the work we’ll show you involves bionic monkeys, The Logo Factory staff are quite adept at producing serious stuff too. Though you gotta admit, [...]