Hawken Blog

I recently created a banner for a really good new Minecraft mod named Femtocraft. This is what it looks like:

In this blog, Itszuvalex credits N0rw0lf. I have different names for different things, but lately I have been going by Hawken for everything, since that is my artist name on soundcloud (my logo was made by me, as well). N0rw0lf is just my minecraft community name.

I wanted to guide people through the process about how to make such a logo. Some of it is intuition, but much of it just comes down to techniques that you learn slowly learn.

At first, I came up with multiple rough versions. My very first prototype looked like this:
Not gorgeous? No, its not supposed to be. Its supposed to embody a certain direction, a certain style. Its a quick rough draft that I use to make sure that the person who I'm making the logo for actually likes the style I am aiming for.

There are a few ways you can make something like this. You can draw it by hand, scan it and then make a vector version (Using Gimp, Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator and many more). Usually you use the "pen" tool for this, the tool that allows you to make custom shapes by drawing the edges in. Another option is to just skip straight to designing it with the vector art. That's what I did. My weapon of choice was Adobe Fireworks, a very good underrated tool for web design, vector graphics and even image manipulation. It has a powerful layering system with different effects.

Usually, after a few revisions, you get a good prototype that they are pleased with. I ended up with this: These were the first 5 letters that I used as a demo, because they demonstrated the style pretty well. This one fit Femtocraft's style the best, so we decided to go with it.

Notice those blue lines? Those are guides, and they make all the difference between a cool looking logo design and a professional looking logo design. You want everything to look as proportional as possible, as lined up as possible and make sure the logo flows properly. Make sure to align similar features to these lines, and you will be golden.

Eventually, after aligning everything for a long time, you get this:
Notice how I left out the last F and the last T? That's because we already have designed those letters elsewhere in the logo. Certain (more extravagant) logo styles will require that you make a different design for that letter, but this logo was supposed to be clean cut with sharp edges, two different Fs and Ts would have looked weird. Also, why do more work than you have to do?

With that done, all that was left was to make textures for the background in the banner, but that is a topic for a different post at a different time.