CREATING A LOGO Photo: for a creative company.

By John VanSteenberg

Recently, in addition to a CD cover, I was asked to create a company logo for Emmanuel’s music and custom sound production business. Let’s look at designing an image for his company logo.

Planning the design:

The design goal we agreed on is: a radical, fun and interesting image of Emmanuel and his tools, an array of keyboards.

Elements to consider:

Unique fun portrait of him.
Lots of energy and intrigue.
Keyboards.
Visually exciting.

Decisions:

To include an array of keyboards and to avoid triteness, we decided to go for something rather unique and fun rather than E just playing the keyboard. We decide to have Emmanuel ‘surfing’ the musical landscape on one of his keyboards. But, we also wanted more than one keyboard and we wanted a fun mysterious and rather exotic memorable portrait.

Implementation:

In order to accomplish this I knew we would need both careful optical selections and digital post production technologies. So, here is the step by step of how the plan unfolded:

1-Chose a very high angle, very wide angle for the portrait. (Shot from a low ladder with my SP 10-24). This accentuates the keyboard and distorts Emmanuel's head and body proportions adding intrigue and energy.

2-Chose a very unique pose with E holding the keyboard in a very unconventional manner and riding a second keyboard, like a skate or surf board. (Since standing on the instrument was not possible, we would have to do that in post).

3-Make the separate image of another of E’s keyboards for insertion later as the skate board. (This was made with the SP 17-50).

4-Then we would go into post production.

Here are the images as they were created and modified:

Overhead portrait. First, I shot Emmanuel on a green screen so that I could control and easily drop out the background and add elements to the scene. I wanted the image to be visually unique and somewhat distorted in perspective for interest and to emphasize the keyboards and make E’s head quite large (implying a big brain) with very direct eye contact. Therefore, the SP 10-24mm was used with it’s extreme wide angle and huge depth of field. The scene was lit with a 6’ round soft box with checkerboard louvers and a hair (rim) light. I was about 2 feet from E’s head when I made the image.

Shot of the keyboard. A simple straight green screen easily manipulated into the final image. (Shot with my trusty SP 17-50).

Combined the two images:

In Photoshop I dropped out the green screen, cleaned up the rest of the background and retouched the selection of E and the keyboard he is holding.
Then I put the second keyboard under E’s feet. To do that, I:

rotated the image and

transformed the shape for perspective, remembering to distort it.

I added drop shadows and streaking and an offset blur to add energy and imply movement.

Drop shadows on both the portrait and the keyboard shots.
Blur on E’s portrait.
Streaking in the drop shadows and blur to imply movement and direction.

Wrapped everything in plastic to distort and add mystery and kind of a cocoon around E and his keys. Since I couldn’t really do this without suffocating him, I knew that I would do this in post production work to make the image unique and tie the design elements together. (The key to this step is selecting the best effect and adjusting the opacity and blending between the image and the effect.) Create a duplicate layer of E and dodge out the plastic directly over half of E’s face (somewhat randomly) so that his face is at least partially exposed and direct eye contact is enhanced.

Retouch and clean up elements and flatten the image into one final grouped set of elements.

And this is the final result and LOGO image Emmanuel will use.

I converted my RAW files in Bibble Labs Bibble 5.0 PRO software to adjust exposure, density, contrast and color to precisely what I wanted and matched to each other. Then I used Photoshop to composite the image and add effects and typography. The lighting was a 6’ round soft box with checkerboard louvers and a hair light.

Thanks to Emmanuel for his creative ideas and the most interesting new album I have heard in years and for allowing me to use these images for the blog. Special thanks to Jeff and Jamie Brown of the superb “Incognito Portrait Design” studio for the use of their spectacular studio facilities (www.incognitoportraitdesign.com).

John