Firstly, why bother with a logo? For my sports photography, I supposed that having a logo would help people associate my work with a name, a brand. A mark in the corner of my images would serve this purpose while also helping to remedy the situations in which I’m not credited for the photos. Also, let’s be honest: having a logo, a visual identification of something, just sounded appealing.

Functionally, I also needed to consider the applications and style of the logo. For the most part, I would need something flexible, usable for various sizes and purposes, be it for a watermark in front of various backgrounds, profile picture, a stinger at the end of highlight reels, or even physically on stickers. This would most likely mean that my logo would be monochrome, with any text separable from the actual mark.

Stylistically, I knew that I wanted something more symbolic in nature, but also that I’d need a primary version that included my name; I’m not yet as famous as Nike or Apple, unfortunately. 

Before putting pencil to paper, I looked to compile some inspiration, creating a moodboard, if you will. Notice the geometric, minimalistic theme across all the references – I guess that’s just what spoke to me.

Yes, that is a Google Drawings canvas. From there, I started to sketch some designs in a notebook. On principle, a logo should convey ideas relating to the brand. So, for me, this meant somehow communicating notions of sports, photography, action, etc, while avoiding being cliche. For example, incorporating aperture shutters or image brackets just seemed textbook “stock.” I started with an arrangement of my initials and iterated from there, trying to find unique ways to assemble K and X. I also wanted to utilize someway, somehow that the triangular nature of the two letters, and their similarities typographically:

Amidst the many terrible drawings, I marked a few designs that I liked, and finalized on one that found a nice balance between form (visual appeal, essentially) and function. (Can you find the drawing of the one I picked?) After choosing a design, I moved to Adobe Illustrator, a vector graphics software. Because of how geometric the design was, I was able to create the logo from scratch. Otherwise, I would have uploaded a scanned copy and traced it out using the pen tool. At this point, I also tinkered with alternate versions of the logo and selected a typeface for the text.

After the mark was finalized, I created different lockups of the logo, for various applications (the all-white artboards are where the logo is in white against a transparent background):

And, viola!

** After almost two years with the logo, I have some irks with the logo: I think that the idea of sports photography, or at least creativity, could be communicated better, and that the design is somewhat too straightforward. Maybe time for a change?

Some lessons:

• Before my first sketches, I had attempted to design a logo straight from Adobe Illustrator. The designs were too simple, and I was somewhat hindered in creating designs by my own unfamiliarity with the software in comparison to good ol’ Ticonderoga. Don’t let the medium hinder your process.
• A lot of sketches led to dead ends, but I forced myself to be okay with these throwaways. “You can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.”
• Being somewhat novice to Illustrator, finding new tools and shortcuts saved time in the long run as I worked through the design. Understanding the fundamentals pays dividends.