"Logo A-go-go" - The Blog's New Logo

Design is thinking

made visual.

- Saul Bass

Hello all, welcome back to another Friday on The Art of Caesura!

I'm sending loads of positive vibes your way, especially if you need them today!

We've been looking at Black Templars (including the big man himself) for the past few weeks, but today's post is one of those ones that's a bit different; it's a little look behind the scenes of the blog.  

A year and a half into this blog, I saw one of my photos on someone else's site. After the glow of near-fame wore off, I was a little peeved that I hadn't been referenced, in fact the person was trying to pawn my work off as their own! So, 7 years ago, I created my own logo which has adorned the (typically bottom right) corner of my photos ever since. Well, that is, up until about 6 months ago. 

So what happened? Nothing too interesting, just that I got a new computer for work, but I didn't transfer everything over from my old computer and when I tried to re-download GIMP (the free photo editing software that I used to apply my logo) I was unable to re-import my logo as a brush. As I said - not too exciting. 

I have been wanting, for a couple of years now, to create a new logo. I love my old logo; I spent ages making it (in "paint"). My wife even created a bunch of merch for the blog using that logo! I even went on to get a tattoo using that specific font, so suffice to say the logo means a lot to me. While I still stand by the design cues that went into it, I acknowledge that it does look a little "home made". So, after 7 years, and with my old logo somewhat out of commission on my old computer, I decided to design a new one. 

I wanted to keep many of the elements that I had put into the first one:

1) Black and white to not clash with colours on the miniatures

2) involving a "background" (i.e. not just floating words), to improve visibility on different backgrounds. 

3) "Similar" font. I love the "Party Business" font based on Bilbo Baggins' handwriting (as I said, I have a tattoo using that font), but I admit that in a small logo it is not the most legible. I will retain this font for the header on the blog's landing page - which is larger and more readable. 

There were some areas that I wanted to improve upon:

1) Improve readability.

2) Unify Work-in-progress and regular logo. 

3) Retain a "line" motif (to harken back to the caesura symbol) that has references to fantasy or sci-fi. 

3) Make it look more professional.

I aim to improve readability by using a font that is more legible in a small size.

While it was fun having two different versions of the logo (the "regular" one and the "paint splatter" one) it did increase editing time, which I hope to reduce. I think the background of the new logo has enough of a painterly vibe to be a nice half-way house between the design of the previous two. 

The vertical line in the background of the new logo could either be interpreted as a fantasy spear or a sci-fi jet stream and it's verticality references the caesura symbol.

The main impetus is to make the logo look more professional. Elements of the old one which were a bit rough and ready were: the words were not perfectly centred within the circle, each word was a different size and the oblique lines in the background were a bit rough. This is because it was all hand made in Microsoft Paint (Microsoft Paint 3D to be precise). I remember hand-drawing those lines in the background using my laptop's touch pad because I could get them straighter than with my mouse. In the small format of the logo these minor distractions were barely visible, but for me, copying those logos hundreds, nay thousands of times, they would irk me at times. 

So for the new logo, I tried many different programs: I tried Microsoft Paint 3D again but ran into the same issues as before. I tried Canva and various other online apps but could never find get it quite right. Finally, I turned to abominable intelligence: Microsoft's Copilot. It got me a bit of the way there, far enough that I could then edit the image in the bog-standard Microsoft "Photo" app. After a bit of faffing around with it, it is my pleasure to present to you the new logo of The Art of Caesura:

But, it didn't end there! That was only a picture after all, I still needed to convert it into a logo. I won't go into the finer details, but you can find many of them in this useful video that I used for reference (I couldn't remember how I'd done it all those years ago). After converting it to a PNG file and creating layers, I removed the background by hand:

And in the end I reached this:

I'm really proud of the blog's new logo, and I'm excited to see it adorning the corner of thousands of photos to come!

Thanks for tuning in, and I'll see you next week on The Art of Caesura!

Reading: Lords of Mars - Graham McNeill

Watching: VEEP

Gaming: Diablo IV

Next Week:

The Xenos threat...