"The Smash Pad" logo design

[Seith]

Hey guys, i've been spending the past few days working on the logo for my arcade machine.  I've just completed the outline as a vector graphic and I showed the finished inking (logo V1.jpg) to a friend of mine who is a teacher and artist.  She said she really liked it but she made the suggestion that I change the swoop of the H from "bottom-left-mid-right" to "mid-left-bottom-right" so that it follows the flow of the logo overall.  I tried it but i'm not sure i'm entirely happy with the results (logo V2.jpg).  Which of the two logos looks better?

[shrunkenmaster]

Logo 1 every time!

[EightBySix]

+1

The second looks like "Smasn"

[Seith]

Thanks for the input, guys!  I've done a few slight updates/adjustments to the logo design:

-brought it in from the left
-vertically aligned the left and right stars
-changed the look of the "M" to better fit with the rest of the word
-re-angled the negative space between "M" and "A" to follow the slant of the "H" closer
-cleaned up some rough curves on the outline

Updated work attached.  Feedback welcome 

[broberg]

Don't know if it's intentional but the lines around the letters aren't even in thickness, and the "S"s could use some smoothing of the curves (some spacing issues), Maybe use less vectorpoints? (in my experience it makes objects smoother)
And maybe make the "THE" in the logo less sharp, round of some corners since the other letters in the logo are more or less rounded.

Otherwise I like the concept! What colors are you going to use?

[Seith]

Don't know if it's intentional but the lines around the letters aren't even in thickness, and the "S"s could use some smoothing of the curves (some spacing issues), Maybe use less vectorpoints? (in my experience it makes objects smoother)
And maybe make the "THE" in the logo less sharp, round of some corners since the other letters in the logo are more or less rounded.

Otherwise I like the concept! What colors are you going to use?

Actually, it's funny you mention the lines in "THE" because I was thinking the same thing.  I wasn't satisfied with how rigid they were compared to the curviness of the rest of the logo.  As for colors, i'm set on the colors of the letters and border (see pic 1) and i'm thinking just 2 complementary solid colors for the bar and the background, but i'm not sure what.  While I was doing the fills for the letters and bar, I had thrown in some red and orange (see pic 2), but i'm not sure if i'm 100% sold on those yet because i'm not sure i'd be happy with doing red t-molding on the project (i want the t-molding to match the logo and for some reason i'm gravitating towards blue over red [see pic 3])

[jimmy2x2x]

Blue gets my vote, looks great, nice contrast

[thatitalian]

I'm curious to know if this was done on paper and then Vector Magic'd? It may explain the line thickness. I have done that with one piece of art to test it and had the same issue. As a result I put into a "wire frame" mode, tweaked it and then added stroke to get an even thickness. It actually saved me time in the long run.

[Seith]

I'm curious to know if this was done on paper and then Vector Magic'd? It may explain the line thickness. I have done that with one piece of art to test it and had the same issue. As a result I put into a "wire frame" mode, tweaked it and then added stroke to get an even thickness. It actually saved me time in the long run.

Actually I drew it up, scanned it, and then did strokeless fills by hand over the scan using Inkscape.  I used Beavotron's guide, having never touched vector-art applications before.

The strokes i'm still slowly working on as I go, but ideally i'd like them all consistent thickness except for the stars, which I like having the variable-widths (seems to add character to them).

[broberg]

Improvement! And I agree with the others, the blue scheme looks best so far!

And what I meant with the vector points, I hand traced your logo and then took a screenshot with the points highlighted so you can see what I mean by using less points. The less point you use you'll get a smoother flow to the curves! Well at least it's easier to get the flow with lesser points.


(It's not perfect, it's just a rough example to illustrate my point)

[Seith]

That looks great!  When I get the chance, i'll go through and reduce my points down to an acceptable level (sidenote: the members of this forum are very keen-eyed, I was impressed when the points issue was brought up, because my design does in fact have a large number of them).

Right now a friend of mine that has more experience with graphic design and is doing work on designing a MALA layout for me has the .svg file in the state it was last posted as in this thread and is modifying it slightly to help fit with the overall theme we're creating.  So when I get his finished work, i'll look into it from there.  Thanks again guys! 

[Seith]

A graphic design friend of mine offered to do an alternate take on my work:



This is definitely not the finished product, he tells me, but more of a general idea as to where he was going to take it.  Personally, i'm still gravitating toward what I had originally done, although I could definitely see the benefit to basing the text on a font as opposed to "drawing" the text (allows for other words and things to use the same font i.e. frontend stuff)

What do you think?  Does it show promise?  Or should I stick with my original design?

[Rook3]

Just my opinion, but I prefer your original design.

[Seith]

Thanks, I do as well.  It has more charm to it.  Think i'm going to stick with that.  I'm not sure what i'm going to do to fill the rest of the marquee space though... any ideas?  I kind of want to distance myself from using any familiar and/or trademarked characters, opting instead to work more with basic shapes and curved lines.  Will have to tinker with it more over the holidays when I have some more time, just started a new job which is taking up a lot of my time right now.  Willing to take suggestions though, so leave 'em!

[BobA]

 She said she really liked it but she made the suggestion that I change the swoop of the H from "bottom-left-mid-right" to "mid-left-bottom-right" so that it follows the flow of the logo overall.  I tried it but i'm not sure i'm entirely happy with the results (logo V2.jpg).  Which of the two logos looks better?

It looks like an N when you do that.  I think your friend (teacher) is OTL.

[Seith]

So it recently came to my attention that I had inadvertently lost the original vector drawing of the logo for The Smashpad through a careless formatting of a USB stick.  I figured i'd take the suggestions made in this thread and re-do it last night.  I filmed the process:



What do you think?

[nordemoniac]

Guys, just a heads up.

Whenever you make a mistake like this, like format a USB drive, delete a file from the computer etc, just disconnect the drive, or turn the computer off.

It is NOT lost!

Nowadays you don't use "full format", because it's not necessary, and it isn't like the old XP format.

Full format on XP writes a zero to every little block of your harddrive (that's why it takes so long), while Vista/7 just scans the whole drive, to make sure that all the blocks on the drive can be read.

When you delete a file, you "mark" the file, or the blocks as available. It is NOT gone before you overwrite (that's why I'm telling you to turn off the computer immediately).

If it's a USB-drive, you'll most likely not have anything writing to it, so you can use the same computer. If it's your computer harddrive, you have to use another computer, or boot from a CD, so the operating system doesn't start using the space where you just deleted a file.

I have had a lot of good results with Easeus Data recovery and partition recovery (partition is free!). I've restored a lot of files for friends (I work with IT), and I have allways got 100% back.

Just try it before you starting doing a lot of uneccessary work

And guys... Backup! SynkBack is highly recommended (Free), although SE version is easier to use, and it's easier to exclude folders etc. I thinks it's $20 or something.

Btw; I'm not trying to advertise or anything, I'm just sharing my experiences!

PM me if you need some help restoring files. I will be happy to help!

[SavannahLion]

Nowadays you don't use "full format", because it's not necessary, and it isn't like the old XP format.

Full format on XP writes a zero to every little block of your harddrive (that's why it takes so long), while Vista/7 just scans the whole drive, to make sure that all the blocks on the drive can be read.

You have it backwards or I missed whatever patch was applied to XP since the last time I did data recovery on an XP disc.. XP's format routine does not Zero write a disc during format. That ability was not intrinsically handed down until Vista. KB941961 seems to support that. Of course this doesn't deal with other data destroying processes during a format, like a tables being resized or whatever.

[nordemoniac]

Yeah. Normally on Vista/7 etc. it now just does a surface scan to check if there's any bad sectors.

Anyways, my point was that when you delete something, even the whole partition, nothing is changed. You can restore the partitions to another drive, and get your data back.

[Seith]

At any rate, by the time I had realized that I didn't have a locally-stored copy of the original it was too late 

Ah well, it's been remade and the Inkscape file is here to download:

http://www1.zippyshare.com/v/34337642/file.html

That file is the logo on a document that is the size of my proposed marquee.  I am hitting a wall when it comes to what I'm going to do with all that white space.  Any suggestions?

[Seith]

Got my marquee designed ^^

Now i'm having a real hard time struggling with what to do for the control panel.

Here is the CP dimensions:

[Seith]

Not looking for anyone to design something for me for the CP, rather maybe some creative suggestions?  The cab is modified from the Jakobud cab dimensions.  Black laminate on sides, happ red t-molding, p1 red happ concave buttons and black bat-top, p2 blue happ concave buttons and black bat-top.

Kind of hit a wall on the design side of things, would like some input.  Describe what you think would look good on the above control panel ^^^^^^^^^^