Senior Thesis: A Weekly Update

And now, a little post about logo evolution! Above is the final logo I am using for the business I am branding as a part of my senior thesis project. The composition at face value is very simple: a combination of a word and symbol using lines of varying thicknesses, not much color. Simple enough, right? Wrong! This logo took me nearly four months to create... I didn't work on it constantly of course, but the idea for my senior thesis and this logo came from an unexpected project... Below I have a 'spark-notes' edition so to speak of the evolution of my logo from start to finish...

Once upon a time... more specifically, this past June...

My mom wanted me to decorate a pair of canvas shoes for her Bonnaroo music festival adventures (and yes both my parents attended, shocking I know). So being a good daughter I did. I usually would sit for 3 or 4 hours at a time, when work was slow, and just start doodling. Surprisingly, I ended up loving the process just as much as the finished product. I wanted to leave my mark, but personally, I am not super fond of my first name, so decided to shorthand it, to play on the mad obsession and focus I had over making these shoes, turns out MADD actually is a well known organization (mothers against drunk driving), needless to say that had to change asap. When you are creating a logo, you want immediate recognition- something that is also easily searchable and not confused with anything else... 

Hence the birth of my organization, MADD+S=MADDS, representing my individuality as an artist (Maddy), the mad passion I have for what I do, and the S, is a stand-in for shoes... 


I was drawn to the effortless/impulsive wordmark I had originally made in the sole of the shoes using permanent marker, and I wanted to stay away from using an actual font-when identical letters are placed beside each other, my logo lost that touch of uniqueness. I arranged a text based logo (from my handwriting), just the black square you see on the left. After realizing that logos are more successful when you can use an image paired with text, I was determined to make the shoe fit ;)


I stuck with the colorless theme and hit a few mental roadblocks... I didn't want another additional color dictating the emotion of viewers or the gender of my brand (blue=boy, pink=girl). I also didn't want a black box restricting my logo. I did want a white shoe but I hated how plain the text just looked floating around in a shoe.


Somewhere between craziness and genius, I said to myself, I need to make the picture and text one, not separated. So I removed pieces of the shoe outline and married the two...


And then it just clicked. Once I saw it I knew that was what I was looking for. The brand is as much about the shoe as the shoe's role in the brand. The text retains that impulsive feel and the represents the actual artwork on the original pair of shoes that started the whole idea, but the text reaches outside the parameters of the shoe, which represents how art can push boundaries and not always be restricted to the four corners of a canvas. 



So that was the short and sweet summary of my logo design process, thanks for checking out what I have been working on. I love feedback and I am always in need of constructive criticism, so if you have any thoughts or comments about what I have posted, feel free to leave a comment here or share it with me in person or hit me up on any of those wonderful social media sites! 


-Maddy Fritz