Every once in a while, inspiration hits me pretty much immediately. It's a rare thing, but when it happens, it is oh, so good.

Following this morning's post of "Unanimous Memorial", I promised I would immediately follow up with another logo challenge entry. Well, I am definitely upholding my end of the bargain, and the Random Word Generator gods were extremely kind to me by giving me the hilarious combo, "Inappropriate Fruit".


I picture the company behind this logo being a software company that specializes in creating small, indie games for the iOS and Android platforms. Those game companies usually have silly, catchy names with little mascots to boot, so hey, let's go with that.

Like I mentioned, inspiration for this one came instantly. I knew I wanted it to be a banana, and I knew that I wanted to have the banana flipping everybody off, but instead of showing the banana's middle fingers, I wanted to censor it out a la crazy folks having a tiddy or other body part fall out on one of the best shows of all time, Cops.

Actually, the inspiration for the censoring came out via none other than The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In the game, you can combine ingredients you pick up along the way. Combining food with other food creates food dishes, and combining monster parts with other monster parts creates elixers. BUT if you attempt to cross pollinate a food ingredient with a monster part, you get what the game calls "Dubious Food". Hilariously, the developers thought to censor out the Dubious Food because it was so unpleasant to they eyes.


Prior to the beginning, I asked my wife what specific direction she thought I should go with the banana. She was the one to suggest that I add the sunglasses (an idea I liked) and also suggested that the banana should be peeled instead of unpeeled (an idea that... well... I wasn't so keen on). But usually she is right with her ideas, so that was the route I started to go down in the beginning. I knew I wouldn't be able to "sketch" a peeled banana by hand, so I opted to use a Google Image as a starter. This is the image I chose.


Not even close to what the end product looks like, right?

Well, I took this idea seriously. So seriously, in fact, that I spent two hours trying to make it work. Don't believe me? Check out the screenshot below. I hand traced it, re-colored it, re-colored the strokes of it, and started to reshape it before I finally waved the white flag in defeat.


Because I wasn't a fan of the "peeled" idea to begin with, I went back to the old idea of keeping the banana peeled. Instead of tracing a Google Image by hand again, I decided to create this one totally from scratch. Admittedly, I did use the "peanut butter jelly time" banana as inspiration, but clearly mine is more intricate, so you know I didn't copy it!

So at this point, you'll see that the middle fingers do exist! This is because I didn't know how the censor effect would work. I tried a couple of different things, including the Photoshop > Pixelate feature, but that only made the hand look like an 8-bit piece of art. What I ended up doing was creating a 4x4 grid and just filling each of the squares with a different shade of gray color. The final product actually doesn't include the middle finger asset at all. In order to truly make the censor effect work, I ended up having to delete the middle finger hands.


Perhaps one of the things I am most proud of in this logo is the application of a new technique I learned in Adobe Illustrator this week: lighting and shading. Earlier this week, I watched the video on YouTube below and have been itching to try this on something after learning the new skill.


It's actually a pretty simple process that just takes a little extra time. I think it only took me about 15 minutes to add these extra lighting and shading effects, and I really think they add that little extra something.



Add some transparency to those shapes you see above, and bam: instant lighting and shading. That pretty much completed it for the banana. As far as the text goes, I wanted to keep it simple knowing that the banana mascot is really the star of this piece. That said, I ended up using "The Skinny" font here. If it looks familiar to you, that's because I admittedly (and unashamedly) used it just last week "Flour Garbage's" logo.

And that's it! I think this logo is hilarious, and I'm so glad I got the opportunity to test out some new skills in Adobe Illustrator. What do you all think? Let me know down in the comments. Catch you all in the next one.