Here’s my latest logo and header design, done for Ignite Living.

With a name like Ignite Living I figured right off the bat that the design would be split in two parts. One would be more of a graphical logo utilizing fire in some way, and the other would be “Ignite Living” written in full. Most of the design time was spent trying to find a font that would look good in both situations. I finally settled on Baskerville Semibold.

The first version came out like this:

For some reason I hated it. I could see it had potential but it wasn’t sitting right with me. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

Then I remembered something Collis said in his tutorial about the redesign of FreelanceSwitch. In that tutorial he talks a bit about the depth that even really subtle gradients can give you. In looking at the preliminary version of the logo you can see there are no gradients.

That’s the problem. It looks flat and amateurish to me. I took Collis’ advice and gave gradients to the white text as well as the background. They’re subtle for sure, but look at the difference in the final version of the logo. I also added a vertical line, just for some visual interest and to separate the two logo bits. Here’s how it came out.

Much better! The gradients made all the difference in the world and I ended up loving the logo just because of those changes.

What do you think?

Niall Doherty
26 February 2008 @ 3pm

Love your work. Found my way here via Zen Habits.

The gradients definitely work great, but I’m not crazy about the vertical line. I’d like to see it darker, more subtle.

Keep up the good work.

[Reply]

Rob Record
18 June 2008 @ 4am

I love the gradient and the line – the gradient makes the logo stand out more because it (the logo) is now brighter.

Could do with some more margin on the left though..

Good work!

[Reply]

Charlie
18 June 2008 @ 7am

Thanks, Rob!

Glad you like! Good eye with the left margin too. I could have done a better job of cropping for the post, but check out the actual site and there’s all sorts of space!

Take care, bud. Hope to see you around here some more.

Charlie

[Reply]