Monday, March 31, 2008

I think this is better

I wasn't all that satisfied with my previous attempt at a bumper sticker/letterhead image for my Walk, so as you'll see below, I've tried again. Gone is the Kevin image; gone, too, are the massive bootprint, the varied fonts, and the generally busy design.

It took a while to figure out how I was going to represent America on the bumper sticker; my original thought had been to take an outline map of the Lower 48 and squish that into a bumper sticker's dimensions. I abandoned that idea, however, because such a distortion probably would have made the US unrecognizable. I think that switching over to red, white, and blue works better. I'm probably going to go with this design: it represents everything I want it to-- a walk across America plus the interreligious theme of the trek.



Although it wasn't by design, I kind of like the way Buddhism ends up near the middle, where it should be. The Christian cross floats over my heart, obviously because I'm a Christian (that was by design).

I thought about adding the blog's URL, but decided against it once I saw that the URL simply brought us once again to the edge of "too busy!"

UPDATE: Check out tee shirts here and bumper stickers here. Unlike what you see above, the actual design has no black border.



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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fantastic logo!

Anonymous said...

A definite improvement.

This is just an idea, so take or leave it, but did you consider putting the symbols inside the letters? You have eight symbols, and not counting the apostrophe and "s," you have eight letters left. I have no idea how it would look, but it did occur to me as a possibility.

Kevin Kim said...

C,

I did consider that, and I might still do it, but I worry about scrunching the symbols even further.

I also think that, were I to stick the symbols inside the letters, the letters would show up better if they were placed in the dark blue region (after being changed to white, of course). This would have the effect of dragging the eye unnecessarily toward the bottom of the bumper sticker. I'm not sure that's desirable.

I think I understand your rationale, though: the white background would be less cluttered.

Everything's a trade-off in the design. When I was thinking of sticking the symbols inside the letters, I had thought to use a super-thick sans-serif font like Impact or Haettenschweiler, but the problem with the super-thick fonts is that they're not all that legible when viewed from another car on the highway-- they're too solid.

As a result, I compromised and chose letters that were thick, but that had "wide crotches," if you will. (Imagine the space between Kate Moss's inner thighs, then look at the lower-case "n" above to see what I mean.) This led to my placing the symbols outside of the letters.

But as I said, I might still try your suggestion. It's no big deal to recolor and rearrange the symbols. We'll see.


Kevin

Sean said...

Looks good.