I’ve had another attempt at creating a guitar-related brand. This time, it’s not for another person. This brand is for me. I’ll write about the reason for this brand in a future article. For now, here’s how I came to create the design and colour palette I’ve used for the Guitar Fascination brand.
… Guitar Fascination branding
This year I actually did a small piece of graphic design work. Yay me! It was a really fun project where I worked with a friend I met on social media many years back through our shared love of guitars. He’s actually good at playing guitar though and has decided to share his guitar knowledge with those keen to learn. Hence this logo.
… Stay At Home Guitarist logo
Back in 2010, I created the first real logo for my Scarebear persona. Up until then, I’d applied various designs to the original Scarebear domain, but no true branding. I’d also never really thought through all the different categories or interests of the Scarebear brand. That was mostly because I hadn’t been approaching the Scarebear identity as a brand. Recently, I revisited that and came up with the concept you see here.
The new Scarebear brand allows for the collective design style while allowing for the family of brands to stay true to their individual interests on the newly formed suite of sites for photographic, graphic design and guitar-related materials.
The brand is also more flexible now with options for stacked, horizontal and social profile representations. Should I ever try to make a genuine business out of this brand, I am now able to represent that more professionally.
… Scarebear rebranded
Several months back I was chatting with my friend Brad Williams on Twitter when a logo idea hit me—which was weird because we weren’t initially talking about logos. Brad is an incredibly talented guitar player and a man with a greater fascination for the beauty of all-things-guitar than me. So logically my logo idea was based on the guitar shape. I had this idea that Brad’s initials lent themselves perfectly to the guitar shape.
I sent my initial drawing to Brad and he seemed to like where I was going. Brad also mentioned that he’d always wanted his own logo that featured a crown—a particular style of crown too. I was up for that challenge as long as I could make the crown a six pointed crown. That tied in nicely to the standard six machine heads on a guitar.
After that, the logo almost designed itself. All I had to do was make sure the logo worked as a single colour design as well as a full colour option incorporating the colours Brad liked most in his logo. I’m really happy with how this one turned out. It has been great to design once again.
… Brad Williams Logo
I reached out to my friend James Dean on Twitter, as I knew a while back he was looking for a logo for his video guitar lessons persona online. James is a very talented and giving guitarist who has been giving away instructional videos as people request them. Make sure you check out GuitarStar TV if you’re interested in all-things guitar.
The logo I made comes in two varieties. One that is more square in overall shape and a more landscape version. Both use the same design elements for consistency.
… GuitarStar TV logo
I’ve been following Evangelos Koudonas on Twitter and Soundcloud for a few years now and am a huge fan of his guitar playing. We were talking about CD design recently and I asked him if he’d ever considered a logo or brand for his music. After a very short conversation, I had an idea. That idea resulted in this logo design for Evangelos.
The logo incorporates his initials into the shape of an electric guitar. But not just any guitar. The basic shape for the logo is based on one of Evangelos’ favourite guitars. Brian May’s Red Special. If all goes well, we’ll see this logo on a new CD one day soon.
… Evangelos Koudonas logo
I offered to work on the Tone Chasers logo for a friend on Twitter. The logo is for a guitar gear related website that is currently under development. The concept was to create something that combined the tone chasing concept with the elements of guitar-related tone itself. This was achieved by using the valve/tube design element with the running man (electricity) overlaid.
The logo was created with a stacked and horizontal variation allowing for increased use across multiple media.
… Tone Chasers logo
My third CD artwork job for artist Steve Case involved the creation of a plain CD—it was default silver with black text—and a cardboard sleeve design. Much to my delight, Steve wanted this piece to be primarily black and white. I needed to convert most images so they appeared to come from the same photo shoot—they had not and the lighting was quite different—and the rest of the concept came together after working with Steve on his original ideas. I was once again allowed some creative license, and the finished product is what you see here.
… Steve Case (Helium Heart) CD artwork
I applied the revised Dialtone Pickups logo to this business card design which will be used at the Namm Show in 2015. The business card incorporates the company’s new tagline Go from sounding good to great (as well as the logo) on the front of the card with the business contact details on the back of the card. The font used in the company logo is used to highlight the business card owner and the company URL on the back of the business card.
… Dialtone Pickups business card
The Dialtone Pickups team were looking for a simple, single colour T-shirt design that not only used their logo, bud did so in a way that let people know what their company was about. What better way to let people know you create awesome guitar pickups than by putting your logo in a guitar (right where a pickup would go).
… Dialtone Pickups T-shirt design