Pen Tool Mule

The focus of this week’s activities centred on collecting resources for my album cover, and creating the logo for the record label. For the resources I took some pictures of different areas of the garden, including textures of various surfaces and pictures of interesting objects. After listening to the music I have decided that the album is more ‘Spring’ than it is ‘Russian’. I believe taking influences from nature may be the most constructive way forward.

Another part of my resource collecting included scanning various objects, many of them linked to electronics, music or in some cases both. This proved to be invaluable as my logo design has taken an electronic influence, with me putting electrical symbols and shapes into my rough drawings. On Thursday’s lesson I had a brain wave, and took one of the interesting shapes which I had scanned in and used it to form an Ambient World logo. The object (which was a speaker terminal cross over) was triangular, and had various shapes stamped into it. The object and the development of my logo can be seen below.
After various alterations to the orientation of the shapes, and some chopping and changing of parts, I eventually made an outline which was well within the 1:1 to 2:1 ratio needed for a logo. I also experimented with some colours which I picked from another scan I did. I had inversed the colours, and this gave it a glowing, electrically charged look which I thought was appropriate for an electronic music label.

I found that using Freehand was fairly simple. It has controls that are fairly similar to Photoshop’s pen too, but I certainly missed the convert point tool which allows you to bend the 2 axis on any given point. I am thinking that for my album cover I could combine both a bitmap image and a piece of vector work to go over the top. This is a technique that I have seen many times in pieces of digital artwork, such as the DR posters and in Photoshop magazines. I think doing some ornate foliage based vector work could be something which I could carry through all of the CD, from the cover to the booklet and CD label itself. I will source some pictures for my sketchpad to demonstrate this.

Over the next week I will be creating my 4 logo designs in Freehand, as I think that getting as much experience as possible with this program will be useful – even if some of my logos are discarded. I will also be putting together some initial rough sketches of the website which we have to create to show our style guide. I believe this will take a simple form, as I still have a lot of technical web related stuff to learn before I can create professional looking pages.