Mission Statement and Logo Design Overview Part 1 - Design Brief and Research

Mission Statement - Avalon

The mission for the company is to produce and promote games, which are part of a fantasy world. The main games that will be produced by this company will be medieval based games (Swords and sorcery button bashing).


Logo Design

For my assignment I need to create a logo for a games company, and to come up with a logo I looked up a good method that use a series of stages to do a good logo:

• Design Brief
• Research
• Sketching and Conceptualising

I had a list of five different made up companies to chose from, then from there start going through the series of stages and eventually come up with the final product. I chose AvAlon out of the list, as I felt I had the best knowledge and ideas to come up with the best possible logo. The company games are based on swords and sorcery (button bashing) combat.


Design Brief
As this was a made up company are client was our teacher, where he did give us on what the logo should be based on through the assignment brief, but no sort of specific design to the logo, as long as it was associated to the company.

Three main designs:

1. Two swords sheathed behind a shield, either with the name of the company within the shield or just below it.
2. A circle with the name of the company.
3. A placard for the base, then with a design going around the edges, and the company name within.

Research
To start of with the research from help from my teacher, him and I discussed different ideas to start up my designs for the logo.

I first started the research with the name AvAlon on the internet, and the name was to do with  a legendary island featured in the Arthurian Legend. So I thought this would be a great idea to use to help with my designs.

To think of the best strategy to come up with a design using everything I could find from the Arthurian Legend and breaking apart the logo design I was roughly thinking of, and then doing detailed parts of each sections of it; such as different sword designs (Excalibur), shields, staffs, style of text ETC.

Also researching on companies that do same or similar sort of game to my company, such as:

• WOW(World of Warcraft)
• LOL(League of Legends)
• Lord of the Ring Online
• Dungeon and Dragons Online
• Guild Wars 2

And thoroughly researching these logos has also given me more ideas on what my full product might look like.

Definition and Review on Raster and Vector Graphics

Raster Graphics
Many images use raster graphics, such as images that are imported from your digital camera, and the internet. Raster images are made up of a grid of pixels, and these are also called bitmap. For raster images the larger the image the more disk space it will take up, as the size goes up the more pixels the image will have.

Raster Images can usually be scaled down with no loss of quality, but enlarging a raster image will cause it to look blocky, as the individual pixels will get enlarged and able to see pixel more clearly.

Example of a raster image enlarged:
Raster  images are best used for photographs, as you get great colour detail, but you can not enlarge, as the image will become blurry.

Basic file types for Raster Graphics:

• .jpg/jpeg
• .gif
• .png
• .tiff or .tif
• .psd
• .bmp

Vector Graphics
Unlike raster images that are made up of pixels, and use JPEGs, GIFs and BMP. Vector graphics are not made up of a grid of pixels, but instead these are comprised of paths, made from a start and end point. A path in a image can be a line, square, triangle, or a curvy shape. And with these paths are able to create simple to complex drawings.

As Vector images are not made from a certain amount of dots, they can easily be enlarged in size and not lose any quality. Unlike raster image that will look blurred and blocky. This is ideal for logos, as it can be used on a business card, and then can be scaled up to fit on larger surfaces. Many Flash animations also use vector graphics, since they scale better and typically take up less space than bitmap images.

Example of a vector image enlarged:
Vector images are best used for fonts/logos, as they have the ability to enlarge without losing quality, but this images have a limited colour detail.

Basic file types for Vector Graphics:

• .drw
• .pif
• .pct
• .ps
• .eps
• .svf
• .ai

Websoulz Logo Tutorial - Final Product and Overview

To start of the project I went through a various of different logo design tutorials, but I found that I didn't find the tutorials well informed.

I started off with Websoulz logo, to learn how to use a different range of tools:

• Creating New and Duplicating Layers
• Shape Creation Tool
• How to Use Modify Tools
• Contract
• Gradient
• Fill
• Flipping Image
• Gaussian Blur
• Rasterize Shape Layer
• Inverse
• Stroke
• Burn and Dodge

These are what I have learn from this tutorial, but I played around with these to get a similar final product than the tutorial, so learnt how to use these tools better.

This is my final product of the tutorial:

This is the tutorial: http://websoulz.com/learn-how-to-create-a-futuristic-logo-in-photoshop/