"Back already?! Didn't you just put out a logo challenge post the other day???"

Yup and yup!

Because I fell so far behind after Zelda's release last month, I felt like I should at least do some attempt at catching up. And because I've been so happy with the last two logos, I've been much more inclined to get back into the graphic design scene.


Today's randomly generated words were "Flour Garbage". Those words are about as far apart as you can get, so as far as creating a company behind this phrase goes, I'm admittedly really, really stretching. So you know how people put baking soda inside of fridges to keep foul odors from arising? Well the extremely inventive, clever, and handsome folks have developed a special kind of flour that you can sprinkle into your garbage cans that keeps the trash from getting smelly. (I know, it's genius!)


I immediately knew where I wanted to go with this design. The idea of sprinkling flour in your trash as a means to keep it smelly seemed very hipster-y to me, so I wanted to make this logo look as hipster as possible. Tall, handwritten font? Check. Antique white background with brownish lettering? Check. And those super hipster-y light rays that people love to put behind everything these days? Check, check and check.

Because I have been doing my absolute best to originally create as much as I can without help, I decided to think about the basic shapes that would comprise the garbage bag. When you think about it, it's really just a circle formed into a teardrop shape, a small rectangular area to represent the garbage bag band, and a little triangular shaped piece to represent where the bag is closed at the top. Actually, the shapes look a lot like this.


Sorry if that's hard to see, but after creating those three very basic shapes, it was really a game of "connect the dots" followed by some basic anchor point tweaking using the handy dandy "Scale" tool.

To actually create the band that helps to close the garbage, I actually did that manually using the "Pen" tool. I knew I didn't want anything too fancy with it, so I just eyeballed what seemed to look right. After tweaking the anchor points to be just so... that pretty much completed that part.


I'll revisit this again later, too, but I also want to point out that if you look very closely, you'll notice the stroke of the garbage bag itself isn't one solid, uniform line. After completing the bag, I apply the "Roughen" feature to the line to give it a squiggly-like appearance that is oh so common in hipster logos.

Tossing the actual words onto the garbage bag came next and is easily the most simple piece to this whole design. A quick Google Image search for "tall handwritten font" gives me some ideas for the specific font that I'm looking for, and after just a few clicks, I come across a font called "The Skinny". (Yes, that's its real name.) I don't just type it in and leave it set, however. As you can see in the picture below, I do apply a little bit of a downward facing Arc to it as a means to kind of show that the font is contoured to the curve of the bag. It's subtle, but it's there.


And finally comes what I think is going to be the most difficult piece but actually turns out to be not so bad: I wanted to create those vintage light rays you see on so many hipster logos by hand. I very easily could have found one and re-used one online, but I was intentional about learning how to do this myself.


Admittedly, though, I was not alone in figuring this out. This link here provided a step-by-step tutorial on how to create one of these designs, and really, it is just a lot of math. I could easily re-create this design again in the future without the help of this guide.

First, you start off by creating four sets of segmented lines. These will serve as the foundation for the circular pattern you create in the next steps.


Next, you take your first line segment, place it in the spot you feel is appropriate to begin the circular design, and use the "Rotate" tool to create nine copies of that segment around the center of your pattern. (And because a circle is 360 degrees, all you have to do is plug in 360/9 to do this.) This is actually a concept I was familiar with from past designs, so this first set of segments was cake for me.

When I thought it was only going to get more complex from here, it was actually pretty darned easy to get the rest of my line segments in here. All you have to do is line up the second line segment with the very first line segment, "Rotate" it out 10 degrees, and then do that same 360/9 copy to create 9 more copies of that second line segment.


Repeat that again with the third and fourth segment, of course by starting with the respective 20 and 30 degree rotations. Apply the same "Roughen" technique to give the lines that squiggly look to them, and voila, you've got your vintage light ray design done! Toss that behind your garbage bag, line everything up, and do some minor clean up, and that's all she wrote.


I love the way it turned out, and actually, I'm pretty sure this was the fastest design I created of all the Logo Challenge designs so far. Now that I know how to do the vintage light ray design, I bet I could easily replicate this whole logo from scratch in less than 30 minutes. And that's really what this logo challenge has been all about: giving me a chance to showcase my work while refining my skills along the way.

That does it for this post. Catch you all in the next one.