Cartoon logo: a case study

A step-by-step look at how we design cartoon logos & brands

If ever there was a classic example of a cartoon logos developed by designers at The Logo Factory®, the project for Tek Op is it. Created for a California based IT company, the design for Tek Op (the project originally began life as Nerd Squad but changed later due to possible logo trademark issues) began as all our illustrative logos do. Fleshing out preliminary logo design ideas via a series of sketches and doodles before the designer so much as touches their copy of Adobe Illustrator. As the character was going to be pivotal to the company brand, it was critical that the initial sketches nail down the vibe of the mascot – in this case a monkey – before being turning to digital artwork. It’s only by drawing cartoon logo concepts by hand can we give them ‘life’ as characters brought to life using design software tend to have a cold and mechanical appearance.

Cartoon logos. It’s all in the personality

During initial concept phases, our designers saw the mascot as a ‘bionic’ monkey – in keeping with the hi-tech nature of the company – and played around with various hi-tech, yet still whimsical elements. Once we had settled on this direction for the monkey character (above right) we needed to flesh out his personality, creating a series of character studies, each one featuring different facial expressions that could also be utilized in situational graphics.

Once we had worked out the personality of the monkey, complete with his various expressions, it was time to render the entire character into vector based artwork, using scanned bitmap versions of our original sketches to work from. While there are several auto tracing programs on the market, we’ve never been happy with the results, so bitmap to vector conversion is usually accomplished the old-fashioned way. By eyeball, mouse and digital tablet. Once this conversion was completed, it was simply a matter of adding the company name, in a suitable font, and several design ‘flourishes’ to complete the first finished versions of the design. Colors were added using a four color palette, approved by the client beforehand (due to potential increased printing costs on advertising and marketing material).

As mentioned earlier, this project was the subject of a name change mid-stride due to conflicting trademarks and so many companies using similar names (you’d be surprised how many times this occurs mid way through the logo design process). After consulting with powers that be, the client settled on a new name, Tek Op, and we had to incorporate the new name into our semi-completed artwork. We also took the opportunity to develop the character a little further, removing some extraneous detail from the illustrations.

Even cartoon logos need their stationery design

As is the case with most company logo design projects, once we had finalized our cartoon logo, our designers then moved on to designing business cards, letterheads and other marketing bits and pieces. As is typical, we created a series of business card options that the client could pick from. This is an important phase as we like to create business cards first, and then tailor the rest of the stationery design package to fit the theme we’ve settled on. In this case, we worked on a series of card backs as well.

Once the client had selected a card design, we worked up a set of matching letterheads and envelopes. We stayed away from anything that was terribly busy – this logo design is fairly complex and we didn’t want to clutter the collateral material with too many conflicting graphic elements. How well did we succeed. Judge for yourself:
Final stationery design

Vehicle wrap design

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 – and the price of digital output has dropped significantly over the past few years. Using photo reference, and vehicle wrap templates for the kind of vehicle owned by the client, we were able to work up some visuals as how we thought the artwork should appear. As all our logos and support artwork are in vector format, there’s no issue about resolution or scaling a once the vehicle wrap design was finalized, it was simply a matter of sending the artwork off to be output.

Icons and Flash animation

Using a similar style and graphic approach, our designers then built a series of icons that can be used in brochures, advertising and as navigation icons on the client’s website. As the icons also happened to depict all the company’s services, we also incorporated them into a fairly slick logo animation. Click here to view.