The evolution of a logo

What’s in a logo?

I’ve been toying a lot with personal branding for a while, and my ideas have evolved a lot. Some of this is obviously being done with the website at stevemorrell.fi, to experiment with more longform blogging on topics that I am interested in and want to be known for. Designing a website gives you a lot of scope for tweaking with colours and shapes.

From the beginning I wanted to do things with the Irish flag colours of green and orange. As well as the personal significance, they are colours I tend to use a lot, especially in sports. I once tried on a pair of bright orange running shoes that were a great fit. The salesperson was taken aback when he said he’d see what other colours they had in stock, and I responded that I was taking the bright orange ones. Even all my archery kit is orange, or as I call it “Easy to find”. I also added a Finnish blue into this list as a nod to my adopted home.

The next thing I wanted was a logo that I could use in different places, like as the headline icon on the website. I used this as an excuse to teach myself some adobe software, and to philosophize a bit on what I want to do. I had some ideas from the start…

• I wanted to use the same colours in the logo.

• It would be fun to incorporate my initials of S & M.

• I’d like to use a 3D effect.

• It had to be something with a story and meaning.

Here are some of the doodles that I came up with as potential logos. Included in that is a copy of what the appropriately nerdy games workshop fans will recognise as the logo of the Skaven race. I grew up on Games Workshop material, and the logo of the three overlaid sticks is something that I often doodled, so was something I would have liked to use somehow.

In the end, a lot of this was ironically not for anything, as I decided that I shouldn’t hold off on launching the site for an icon. With this in mind, I loaded the three colours into Adobe illustrator, and tinkered with transforms for a while, until I came up with something I was happy to use on a temporary basis.

The idea of the logo was parked for a while, as other things took priority. As ever however, inspiration can strike at any time. I went to Ireland for a short vacation, and spent a few days in Dublin, including at my Alma Mater of Trinity College Dublin. There was a running joke that I’d never actually seen the Book of Kells, which is TCD’s big tourist attraction, on the grounds that I could always go another time. This despite the fact that I ate lunch outside of the museum for four years, and could go in for free as a student.

So I ponied up the cash to see it, and was treated to a really fun exhibit on the history of printing in Ireland. One thing that stuck out to me was a panel showing the different ways that letters were stylized in the Book of Kells, and one of the “S” panels jumped out to me.

This image had a lot of what I was looking for. It had a 3D effect, I could see an element of the letter S in there, but also a way to work the letter M in. It also had a nice backstory in that it came from my Alma Mater.

I tried replicating the image in Adobe Illustrator, which wasn’t easy, so I went a bit more back to basics, and figured out a way to make a nice overlapping effect with simpler shapes. The final result is below.

This met my brief nicely.

• I could call back to the S & the M being included, without it being too overt.

• The 3D effect was there, as were the colours

• There was some personal backstory to it.

• I also liked the runic feel of one of the shapes. The town where I grew up is the oldest Viking settlement in Ireland, and I have always loved the shapes.

What was also satisfying was the evolution of some of my ideas around values and drivers in career development. A lot of what I have been doing recently was thinking about what really motivated me in work & life, and I feel that this is a really important thing to find time to reflect on. In the final logo, I like the symbolism of a jagged path that loops around like a Möbius strip, with sudden changes and turns in it, but with a more soft and continual line underpinning it.

I’ll be running with this logo, so please do let me know what you think!