Niall's Logo Development

Outside of animation, I have been developing a logo for a friend. This logo is for a website that sells tennis equipment and my friend is currently developing the website while I'm working on the logo.

I would say this project was very much out of my comfort zone. I have designed logos before but this is a paid job so there is a need to create something professional and in addition I am by no means an expert on sports, particularly tennis.

But I felt its sometimes good to force yourself to do things you're not necessarily that comfortable with or enjoy.

I wanted the logo to be as obvious as possible in what the companies about. So I wanted the logo to feature in someway a person playing tennis.

I researched by looking at footage of tennis players performing a serve, in particular Andy Murray because he's Britain's best tennis player and this is a british company. I stencilled over a few screenshots of Murray serving on Photoshop. Then I wanted to combine this images that were currently on separate layers so the logo would almost look like the motion of Murray swinging the racket, thus incorporating some form of animation.    

So the viewer could view each pose separately without it all looking clumped together, it was like I was using scissors to cut and erase parts of each layer and then once this process was finished, instead of looking like four people merged together it would look like one person, one motion, just put together in a way you can tell there are four separate layers.

The results were I feel unsuccessful. I wanted it to be clear what was going on with the motion, in that I made sure there was no overlapping of layers. But I feel the final image just looks jumbled and I felt it was very hard to see what was going on.

For my second logo I decided to go far similar. So instead of trying to portray a motion I stencilled over one image of Andy Murray swinging his racket with one colour, black.

But I still wanted the viewer to visualise motion so I incorporated a swing path of where the racket hits the ball the ball and then where the ball goes. I was inspired to do this by when you watch a tennis match, if the umpire is unsure about something such as where a ball landed on the court. We will watch CGI footage of the ball hitting the ground followed by a smooth yellow line (as I like to think of it, its motion path. I then turned this motion path into a tennis racket like shape.

I simplified the logo down as much as I could by incorporating fewer edges and making lines smoother. This was also useful because I didn't want the  viewer to see the man in the logo as obviously Andy Murray because I was using his image without his permission so I simplified his face down as much as possible so he just looks like a tennis player.

My friend liked where I was going with the logo and liked its energy, but he felt it looked a bit too complicated. The next task will be to simplify the logo down further.