In my quest of one day establishing myself with some sort of part time photography (about which I’m writing also on this blog) I was pondering to get myself a logo. A logo I can put on my website(s), on the facebook-page, on business cards, on a (potential future) letterhead as well as in the emails. A logo that could be the starting point for establishing a photographic brand.
Having been always incapable of properly drawing / painting I always considered commissioning the creation of my own logo with an expert web designer. Initial research showed the expected cost to be between a 100 Euros for a simple design up to several thousand Euros. Definitely something I was not really ready to invest at this point.
While being on a pretty boring three hour train ride on my way home from a business trip earlier in the week I was starting to sketch down some ideas how I want my logo to potentially look like.
I wanted a strong visual component, not only text (as many photographers have), as this I find boring and not as eye-catching as a logo with a visual design. The visual part was to include something referring to photography as well as a reference to my hometown Nuremberg, base of my photographic activity (as well as being the name giver to my blog “Streets of Nuremberg”).
Regarding the reference to photography the first thing I sketched on a napkin (that I got with my beer) was a basic camera design. That really wasn’t all to difficult. Then I googled “Nuremberg”at looked at the pictures that came up. The key visual that came up were pictures of our Imperial Castle that resides prominently on a hilltop above the historic city center. The shape is quite distinctive, so what I did is sketch down a basic silhouette from the main caste, showing the palace, the “Fünfeck”-Tower as well as the “Sinwell”-Tower. And when I saw the two simple sketches next to each other on the small paper I hit me that it looked quite nice and that, besides transferring it from the sketch in a proper drawing, the visual component looked quite complete.
So I took out my laptop, knowing I have basic paint program on it (it’s even called “Paint”) and started to draw up my makeshift camera as well as the castle silhouette. The idea of drawing the logo out of a single line (with the exception of some camera details like lense, shutter and viewer) came while working on it. After optimizing the drawing step by step I saved it as a .png file and put it on a USB-Stick.
After arriving home I got to my Mac and fired up Photoshop. I imported the .png drawing as a layer on an empty A4 canvas with a white background. Then I looked for a nice font for the text caption that I wanted to create as lower part of the logo (on a separate layer). After some trial and error I settled on “Futura Condensed”.
I exported the logo as jpg…e voilà ! Finished is the logo. And I have to say I like it (would be interested what you think – so please comment). And this practically for free (ok, I have the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography subscription for about 10 Euros per month).
I created also a second version to put on a portfolio website that I want to build up. It is free to use with Adobe Portfolio as part of the Creative Cloud subscription (I will do a separate post about this when it is up and running).
This uses a different caption (as I will also show more than street photography content). By the way, to copy just the “lines” of the logo as well as the text onto whatever background you have (any color, not just white) just delete the background layer in Photoshop prior to saving the rest as a “.png”file that you can use for upload on any website on the default background of the website.
I also created a “black” version of the logo (with white lines and caption) to use on a black background. Easy to use in Photoshop.
Hopefully this gives you some inspiration to become creative on your own. Sometimes being creative is not as difficult as it initially seems!
Have a good day!
Marcus
Related Posts:
A Street Photographer’s Business Card