Scottish Creeking

The process of creating a new logo for Summit Rocks.

In the beginning.

Summit Rocks, a new outdoor company selling adventures activities to schools, needed a logo. Now this saga started well over a year ago, but I have learnt so much in that time, I must thank Iain from Summit Rocks, for his patients and faith in me.

 

Round one, the first ideas.

The brief, something simple, with mountains and children. Or something like that, to be honest, it's so long ago that I can't remember the exact brief, but my first designs involved both of these so it must have been something like that.

Well this is what I came up with.  

 

surprisingly this was very like the final logo that I designed, but I had to go through a lot of other ideas first.

 

The curse of the redesign.

 

So what followed was great learning process for me and probably a source of frustration for my client as my designs got more  complicated and probably further away from the brief.

 

 

 

The last design on here nearly made it to being approved, But not quite. We then took quite a long brake from the design process and we came back to it, I decided to call round on the client and get what they really wanted there and then, before this all correspondence had been by computer. This seemed to work. As the first design that I did after the meeting got approved. 

 

Lessons I've learned.

1. Stick to the brief. My imagination started to wander a little left field.
2. Keep on learning. All through this time I was developing new techniques, learning about different theories and getting more familiar with the software I was using.
3. Communication is key. Actually meeting the client face to face and discussing our combined ideas and knowledge made a big difference.
4. Use Mobile Tech. I used Adobe Draw and Adobe Comp in my final design, this made it easy to get a design down when inspiration hits, which it did whilst watching TV.
5. Don't give up. I wasn't going to until the client told me to "bugger off, your crap", as I knew that every rejected design I was learning something new. Luckily the client was patient with me and thing finally came good.

So here it is the final design. 

 

Phew!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo shoot for Black Snow Saddles

Black snow saddles,  not only needed a logo and a website but they also needed some product shots. This was not done in a studio environment, the small items were shot in front of a white background, this made it easier  to cut the products out in photoshop. The larger products were more angular and therefore  were easier to cut out with the Pen tool,  so I didn’t a need backdrop for them. We used natural lighting on the larger products with LEDs for fill lights.  Whilst the smaller products were taken with LED lighting. This is a sample of the product shots. The rest can be seen on blacksnowsaddles.com   

Black Snow Saddle

     

New Web Design

In my last post I said that I was working on a couple of new websites, A few weeks back I finished the first one that I was working on, for a company called Black Snow Saddles. They make and sell outfitting for whitewater canoes. I also had the pleasure of working on their Logo for them too. The brief was that they wanted something simple but striking, So I went for a black,white and grey theme. On both the logo and the website. Here is the logo I came up with.

This fits well on the website, but also on other promotional merchandise here it is used on a T-Shirt.

The website itself was the first time I had tried to do a responsive design, so it took me a little longer than usual. But I was very pleased with the results. This is what the design looks like on different devices.

If you want to check out the company here's a link to their website. blacksnowsaddles.com

New look, New Logo.

I haven't blogged for a while. To be honest I've been out of the country and I've had little to say anyway. But now I've decided to get things moving with Bomb Blast Media. I've been learning lots of new stuff and I have a couple of new website on the way, one of them is hopefully my own. But in the meantime I have set up a Portfolio site on Adobe Behance, so take a look http://bombblastmedia.myportfolio.com/. Hopefully, now I'm Back I will be able to share some of the stuff I've been learning.

Cheers.

Dave.

How to Create 3D Text in Photoshop

How to Create 3D Text in Photoshop



I've started to look at my techniques of coming up with logos. So I am going to be sharing the tutorials I do and the results. This one was in Photoshop and was a little tricky to follow especially step 5, where I pressed just the ALT and down arrows to create duplicate layers as the Ctrl + Alt and down arrows basically just turned my screen upside down. Anyway this is what I created, let me know how you do.

Messing around with new logo ideas.

Every so often I like to change my logo on social media, especially as I noticed that my icon on many social media platforms was circular and my usual logo just didn't work. So I was doing a tutorial on Tutsplus and changed a few things around and came up with this, which looks great in a circle as it looks 3d. Here's the link to the tutorial, https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hazardous-red-background--psd-7 and here is the logo in use on my Google+ page. BB media G+ page