In creating a logo for my YouTube Channel, edrawingboard, I needed to come up with a logo that would show up well as a thumbnail.
Some Background
I purchased the domain edrawingboard.com in 1999. I came up with the name based on the phrase, “It’s back to the drawing board.” My B.S. is in Mechanical Drafting and Design. I’ve always realized that good design and planning is an absolute necessity before resources are allocated to building a prototype of anything. When I earned my M.Ed. in eLearning Design and Technology, those early fundamentals in the design process served me well.
The Company
The company edrawingboard LLC is registered as a design and publishing business. It works with many media types: books, ebooks, audio, video, and animation.
Thinking Through the Process
When coming up with this logo idea, I knew I was going to use the pen nib and as the main component. The dialog box represents the narrative aspect of the business. Whether the focus is traditional storytelling, comics, or non-fiction, a message or story will be delivered. The dialog bubble represents that concept nicely.
The logo had to be simple enough to pass the thumbnail test. I scaled it up and down and played with the negative and positive objects until I got something that worked at a large and small scale.
Tools Used
When creating the actual image, I went back and forth with ChatGPT, working out ideas and looks. AI gave me two designs that came close to what I wanted. For some reason ChatGPT does not work with vector shapes. I was not able to get it to produce a SVG file.
So, I had to downloaded both concepts as PNG files. I brought them into AI to create vector spaces. Then combined the two images. The dialog box look good in one. The pen nib looked good in the other. So I combined the objects, got rid of background colors and 3D effects, and worked with the proportions until I came up with the finished product. I exported what you see here as a PNG file.
After all the modifications I made to the AI concepts, It might have been easier to create the entire thing from scratch in Illustrator. This may not be the final version. It’ll do for now.