If I'm to calculate from the time I'm writing this article and backtrack, then my last 24 hours started from 7 a.m. Monday morning. I usually disliked Mondays back when I was a student because it signifies the start of a new school week and after all the merriment of the weekend, Monday comes with its usual gloomy look and marathon lectures. But now that I have graduated, I see Monday as every other regular day and I'm back to disliking Sundays (I won't say why 😅).
I could have spent the whole day at home yesterday but I had an important task to do back at the university. I was having issues with my institutional email and I need it for the plagiarism test on my final year project, so I visited the ICT unit of my university to sort it out. Luckily it didn't take time for them to rectify the issue and I was able to log in normally. I went home after that and faced the major task I initially planned for the day.
Logo design
I promised a friend that I would help him design a logo for his business and Sunday made it one week that I gave that promise. I have been procrastinating since the day I offered to do the logo and that's probably because it's a free gig and I don't have any motivation to accomplish it. Then why did I offer to do it? Well, it has been over two years that I designed a logo and after seeing the one my friend was using for his business, I felt I should take up that challenge and come up with something better.
That was the previous logo and funny enough my friend said I should still do something similar but it should be simpler and more minimalistic than the current one. I didn't like the current logo but sure enough, I decided to do something similar which means using a symbol of atom as the main basis of the logo. I used my go-to color for logo design which is red and blue. Red and green are better together because they are complementary colors but red and blue work well too.
To be honest I didn't like it because in my opinion it didn't look so good and I didn't spend much time designing it because the concept was already there and I didn't have to spend so much time brainstorming what the logo should look like. I showed my friend the logo and of course he loved it and asked me to put it on a mockup and make it similar to the previous e-flyer. I did that and got the below result. Honestly, the logo looks much better in a 3D mockup.
Seeing as I still had much time on my hands and wasn't satisfied with the logo I did, I decided to do something I had in mind. My friend used the generic symbol of quantum to represent his logo but I decided to use the first letter of his business name (Q) and do the logo. After getting inspiration online and playing around with different colors, I finally settled for the color combination of orange, pink, and purple.
The blue one also looks good and it uses just one color but different shades. The problem I had with the blue one was that the background of the mockup I want to use is also blue (even though a darker shade of blue) and it won't make the logo pop if I also use blue. So, I settled for the orange logo and even that one doesn't look so well on the mockup as compared to that first logo which had red and blue colors.
I decided to just leave the mockup issue and focus on it today. Most of the time it's better to take a break from designing and come back to it later because you will most likely see a flaw in the design or you will come up with a better solution to a problem. I could have continued with modifying the mockup later at night when power supply was restored but I was too sleepy at that point and decided to just do a simple business card using the logo and brand colors, and it actually looks good.
You can see the front and back of the card from that picture. I prefer designing logos and flyers because they are much easier. The main and most important aspect of a business or brand is its logo because that's where everything from the brand color to the mission objective is decided. Once the logo is ready, designing the flyers and business cards is a lot easier because I just have to use the logo colors or at least a part of it for the design (just as I used purple for that business card).
So, that was basically what I did for the past 24 hours. I no longer design professionally as I used to back in 2020/2021 because graphics design is a very serious business but I wasn't taking it seriously and I had no plans of taking it to a higher level. I didn't exactly like it because I'm not actually a very creative person, I'm more logical and that's the reason I dived into programming. Graphics design was just something I did to make money during the COVID-19 lockdown.
But then again, once in a while I still open the Adobe Illustrator and photoshop apps on my laptop to play around with different designs and even edit pictures (yeah I do that too 😉). Later today I will continue working on that logo and refine it more, especially the mockup aspect of it. I will probably have to change the colors of the writeups to make them pop out more on the background of the mockup because as it is now the colors look very dull.
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