Chief Beef: An Exploration of the Logo Making Process
Client:
Personal Work
Task:
Make a black and white logo for a restaurant from scratch.
Goals:
Showcase my creative process (and personality) by including (nearly) all the rough drafts and intermediary steps I made to create a logo.
Step 1: Come up with a name.
I had to make this thing completely from scratch, which included coming up with a name. I started a brain dump and got w some good stuff. I decided that I would like to make a fast food restaurant. I thought about making this project a parody of fast food culture and obesity in America, but I quickly decided to simplify and make a normal restaurant.
Some of my favorite names were Murder for Burger, Cow Murder House, Big Ass Burgers, Nugget Bucket, Deadbird, Chicken Inquisition and Chicken Then Insulin. But the one I ended up going with is Chief Beef.
Step 2: Do some Paper Sketches.
Now that I had a name it was time to make some paper sketches. In my time at Pratt, I discovered that I viewed pencil sketches differently than most of my peers. Instead of making something that looked presentable and worrying about the cross-hatching I would try my best to sync my pen with my brain and get out as many ideas as I possibly could no matter how silly it looked, as long as it got the ideas across. And that’s what I did here.
Step 3: Move to the Computer
I got some pencil sketches down, now it’s time to move to digital. I didn’t have a solid concept in mind at the start. I was still thinking about possibly going the parody route, so I liked the ECG flat line element. After moving past that, I moved onto a CNN-esque logo, which didn’t really have much legs. I found my final direction when I started exploring the typography. I decided to modify a font called colquette and make a 1950s themed diner. After playing around with some generic circles I decided to have a graphic element that represented either a spatula or a hamburger. This led me to my final designs.
Step 4: Revise Final Drafts
After countless iterations and over 100 artboards, I arrived to 5 options that I was comfortable creating a final design from. I eventually landed on the 2nd one from the left. The circle halves represented a burger well while still creating a strong element in of itself. It was now time to make it perfect.
Step 5: Final Logo
At long last, this is it; this is the final. I removed the extra swirl from the C, changed the sizing of the type, strokes, and the circle halves. (I also wanted to see if it would look better with Futura and I wanted to see if a secondary logo was worth exploring, but in the end I sticked with what I had.) At the end, I produced a clean, fundamentally sound logo that fulfilled my goal of having a 1950s themed burger joint.