Ok. You officially have my interest. I loves me some tabletop.
The world of Olgantha is one of fantasy meets gunplay, with lots of cool tidbits thrown in for flavor. I was asked to design a logo that would reflect that. Now, logos are the boon and bane of my existence. It's a tall order to design something that will not only catch the eye, but say a LOT about whatever it's representing as concisely as possible.
Challenge accepted.
Thankfully, the client already had some ideas going into it. He wanted a tavern-like sign that bore the name of the game. Something like these:
He also mentioned a love for a particular font, and the look of old oxidized copper. He wanted flavor on the logo, including some bullet holes. Can do. First things first, though:
Gotta choose a silhouette.
So I sent him a sheet of shapes to pick from. A good logo, like a good character, should really begin at the silhouette. It can make or break the overall look for the finished product. So I sent this on and let him pick his favorite:
Click here to enlarge.
So he settled on numero dos. Fine choice. It has a lot of character and pushes the average sign shape into a bit of Fantasy territory.
Click here to enlarge.
Now, at this point I already knew that I was going to be texturing this piece. I've learned tricks long ago from my brief stint with 3d modelling, and I will often fall back on textures when I want a specific look - not purely realistic, per se, but a nod in that direction. So I fled to the corners of the internet to find what I needed; namely oxidized copper, rusted metal for the bracings and chains, and old wood for the interior of the sign itself.
Click here to enlarge.
Every single one of those is used in the final product in some way, but I'll get into the how of that in a moment. For now, I had a shape, an idea, and a direction, so I set to the basic setup. At this point, I'm not worried about colors or details. I'm only concerned with shapes and layout. So I took his silhouette choice and laid out my ideas in basic shapes on individual layers in Photoshop to see how everything worked together. After a few switches and edits, I came up with this:
Click here to enlarge.
Stylistically, everything was working, and I was pretty pleased with the layout overall. It captured everything I needed to say in the logo from a purely shape-oriented perspective. Now was the fun part: texture and detail.
Normally when I apply texture, I'm doing it on it's own layer (usually an Overlay layer) to blend in to whatever color I'm using beneath. I knew that for the oxidized copper that this would be an issue. I wanted to use all the other colors in my samples, rather than have the whole affair turn out to just be "green. Same for the metal. So, using the shapes as a guide, I simply painted in the textures using the clone stamp tool, blended the different kinds of texture with the clone stamp tool set on different brushes, smudge tool, blur and sharpen tools, adjusted the overall color of it with color balance, and added more detail with the dodge and burn tools set to low exposures. For instance, I started off with the sign interior:
Click here to enlarge.
Here I got the look I want after painting in the texture by adding black lines (for the separate board look), and flipped the entire completed texture to use for the lettering itself. I set that layer to drop shadow, then combined it with the previous layer. I went in and added material the flesh out the spaces in the letters themselves to make up for whatever the layer style missed. I added more distressing to the wood by painting in more scratches and gouges, and then used the burn and dodge tools to give more depth to the planks. From there I added in bullet holes simply by the eraser tool, and then used a standard brush on low opacity and flow to add in tiny details, and the burn tool to give a scorched look to the holes. Here's a detail show of the texture after it's been sharpened:
From there, it was all about step-and-repeat, with a few additions here and there to give form and shape to the individual elements.
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Detail of the copper:
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Detail on the chain:
I added in a secondary light to make things pop a bit more. I decided on red because it added a lot of warmth to the piece, but was also almost sinister. I liked the look, especially given the nature of the world that this logo was representing. The final product?
Click here to enlarge.
Thus is the journey of a logo from conception to completion. At least this time. The client liked it, contract met, and I hope you at home like it, the upcoming game, and my little look into the process.
Until next time.
