Final Illustrator Logo Project

This is the finished logo for my Illustrator project in COM 561. Let’s talk about how we got here.

In the business of television news, we are always looking for new and innovative ways to disseminate our content and promote our brand. A few years ago, I came up with the idea to create a podcast that focuses on weather in the Pacific Northwest. The podcast format would give us a more casual setting and more time to talk about local weather phenomena, interview weather experts, and give a behind the scenes glimpse at what it is like to work in the news business. After taking a break from the podcast, we are going to revive it in the coming months and I wanted to give it a new logo.

It was important to incorporate weather and audio elements into the design, but I did not want it to be too busy. I sketched out some ideas and found that with many of my ideas, there was too much going on. I tried incorporating the words into the logo and then using a microphone cord to draw the cloud. I experimented with clouds, sun, and lightning. Here are a couple of my initial drawings (as you can tell, I’m not an artist).

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I decided to simplify. For the cloud, I used the elliptical tool and created four circles of different sizes. To fill in the gaps at the bottom, I used a rectangle and then used the pathfinder tool to make it one piece. I filled it with blue and added a small darker outline to give it a little more pop.

The sun was made using the elliptical tool. I added a gradient to the yellow and orange colors to give it a more interesting look.

I really struggled trying to figure out how to incorporate the microphone. Did I want to make it small or big? Should it be in the foreground or the background? I went looking for some logo ideas that involved microphones. I considered using a handheld mic or a studio standup mic for the design. I liked the look of the studio mic better. I found this tutorial on how to draw a microphone. I followed those instructions, which included making a rectangle and bringing in the edges so they were rounded. Then making another larger one and deleting some of the points using the direct selection tool for the curved part of the stand. The rest of the stand was made with the line tool. I also added my own twist by including the white line just below center and the white dots on the top half. I arranged the dots to make a “W” for “weather.” It’s a small detail that others might not notice, but I liked it.

I picked the font Copperplate for this project. I put that at the bottom instead of incorporating it into the drawings. The separation looks better. I added some width to the letters in the word “podcast” to give it a little more emphasis. The first draft ended up looking like this.

Not bad, but the logo had a few issues. My peers pointed out that the gradient on the sun and stroke on the cloud were unnecessary. The sun also only needed one circle, not two different colors. After stepping away and coming back to it, I noticed there were some balance issues with the logo as well. Was I making things too complicated? Looks like it.

First, I got rid of the stroke on the cloud and made the sun a solid yellow/orange color. I decided to use the reflect tool on the cloud so the shorter side was on the right. That’s where I put the sun to balance it out. Finally, I stretched out the word “podcast” a bit more to give it more emphasis. I also increased the stroke of the lines a bit on the microphone so the base looked better when the logo was smaller.

I’m happy with how the final logo turned out. It looks good small or large, has a nice balance to it, and it’s a good representation of what a podcast is and what ours is about.