I'm a minimalist at heart. For the longest time I refused to use anything but plain text for the header of my personal blog. However, after realizing the importance branding and differentiating myself, I decided to come up with some type of logo.
All of this started with the idea of making eye's out of the two a's in my name. I opened Photoshop, created a new document, added some text and began dabbling.
I thought it would be interesting to show the progression of the logo as I dabbled with the design. You'll notice how I go full circle from minimalistic, to busy and crowded, and then back to minimalistic.
Here's the one that started it all. It started with the idea of making eye's out of the two a's in my name. At this point I wasn't even treating the logo idea seriously.
This is where I started to take the idea a little more seriously and began mixing in my tag line.
I played with the Photoshop custom shapes tool and found some grass.
I took the custom shapes a little too far; looks too busy.
Realizing that the green grass looks a lot like hair, I moved the face away from the letters.
Not liking how the tag line was spread all over the place, I brought it together at the bottom.
My perfectionist self couldn't be happy with the hand-drawn smile. So, using the same font as I used for my name, I created a parentheses and turned it on its side for the smile. I also changed the eyes using a hard-rounded brush instead of a soft-rounded brush.
For the final revision, I tweaked the tag line and replaced the commas with dot separators.
Design is definitely not one of my strong points, but I'm happy with the way the final logo came out. In fact, it's probably the best and most creative logo I've ever come up with. 🙂