Illustrative logo: A case study

An anatomy of an illustrative logo project

Clients, designers and site visitors often comment that many of the logos developed by The Logo Factory® have a particular ‘look’ – a highly rendered style that is quite unique when compared to other design firms. Probably true – a lot of the work featured in our logo design portfolio are illustrations by nature – influenced by the formal illustration background of TLF staffers, as well as the history of our studio. While illustrations used in logos are not for every business or venture, we’ve had a lot of requests for this kind of design since we opened our doors and it’s remained a specialty of our shop. Accordingly, we thought it would be fun to show you the stages that go into making a highly illustrative logo – anatomy of an illustrative design if you will – and to do so, we’d use the project for Comic Vine, a client who, as part of their client brief, had requested an identity with a ‘comic book vixen’.

Always start with the doodles

Like all illustrative company logos, this project began the old-fashioned way – with, pencil, pen and paper. Rather than hurriedly jumping into desktop design software, our designers always begin a project like this by drawing a series of rough sketches and concepts which are then shown to the client. Once we’ve captured the basic creative direction our designers then begin to fine-tune and formalize the drawings through another series of illustrations – each phase a little ‘tighter’ than the last, until we’ve arrived at acceptable concept.

Time to render

After we’ve arrived at a preliminary concept that’s getting ‘close’ to the desired result, these sketches are turned into digital artwork and rendered using vector based design software such as Adobe Illustrator. We can now begin to add colors and font treatments – all the various design elements that combine to make a memorable logo. In the case of Comic Vine, our illustrators added a comic-book hero styled font, designed to add a super hero flair that was suitable for the project.

Due to the amount of pre-production time required, illustrative logos are restricted to our professional logo design packages (or higher). Illustrative is only one of of several logotypes, each having its own set of merits, advantages and disadvantages. Which is the best for your particular application? That depends on your business type, projected market segment and audience. The final logo for Comic Vine? You can see that above. As far as the client’s reaction to their new logo?

Here’s what they had to say.

Click here for more examples of illustrative logos.