@ Andrew: I agree. After a few days of reflection, I’m reverting to my original decision to place the swash on the ‘n’. It’s definitely more interesting and there were conflicts between the tails of the ‘n’ and swash on the ‘f’.

@ Wez: Like most of the letters, the swash certainly needs neatening up. I feel that way even more now (after a week away) than before!

@ Ollie: Thanks for bringing that up. It’s another one to consider.

@ Nick: Wow, that’s so interesting! I wasn’t aware of that. I really appreciate you letting us know about that – I’m going to discuss this concep with the guys o Monday.

@ Brian: I agree 100% on all tracking issues. These will be tidied up for sure. However, I simply feel that – as with natural writing – not all letters should be joined if there’s no natural flow or need for them to do so. Also, the ‘fi’ is joined (hence the ligature).

@ Willie: Well, it has its similarities, as we’ve been discussing. It’s certainly something that we’re addressing (possibly even by moving away from this entirely – who knows?).

@ John: I see your points, although I think we’re pretty settled on ‘Carsonified’ now, I’m afraid!

@ Michael Olsen: Yep, another ‘c’ logo to add to the list! ;)

@ Andy Croll: Great idea! I’ve been thinking of something similar; the idea of progression (left to right) from ‘sketched’ to ‘finished’. It’s not something I’ve spent too much time on yet but I really like your idea of creating the visual distinction between ‘carson’ and ‘ified’. If we return to this logo, this is definitely a route I’ll pursue. Thanks!

@ Matt Munsey: Colour and texture… yes, quite possibly…

@ Bustaa: Hmmm…

@ BradM: This might be something I do after we’ve come up with the final thing. I’ll be the first to admit that my Illustrator skills are way behind my Photoshop skills, so I’ll probably have to brush up a bit myself!

@ Jeremy Jarvis: It’s a great tool, especially for people – like me – who work primarily in Photoshop. Nice use of text shadows on your site, by the way! :)

@ Martin: Yep, I’m going to give the swash back to the ‘n’ (see above).

@ Julian Schrader: Agreed!

@ Kevin: Yeah, I like their aesthetic. We’ve been having a look at their stuff too.

@ G: I think Lisa’s already answered your comment pretty well, but I just wanted to clarify that I was under no pressure to post a blog entry / video every day. In fact, I never intended it to be more than a couple per week! It just turned out that I felt I had enough material and ideas I wanted to share.

Also, having too much response too quick is just bad. Make up your own opinion and come up with a personal and therefore distinctive solution. Come back in a week or two. Meanwhile, work on other things too, to keep your head cool, instead having the constant pressure of ‘oh man, I need to post something cool on youtube today, and make sure I’m not ruining my career’.

here’s their site:
http://www.skinnycorp.com

However, it’s interesting to watch the progress.

Overall, I really like the balancing of the outside C and D curves but the Coke and Carlsberg associations do worry me a little bit.

It was perfect for converting my sketch into a vectorised version…

http://blog.brightbox.co.uk/posts/the-branding-of-brightbox

…lame…

I don’t see leaving the “ified” in the hand-draw kind of stage, while then cleaning up the “Carson” part. I think it would look more unfinished then saying “continually changing”

I think this difference would be best handled with color and texture.

I do like the concept of the hand-drawn sketchiness of it all though. Keep developing it.

I think although Brian (above) seems generally down on the logo, it’s clearly evoking the right feeling… a crafted hand-written letter is exactly the vibe you’ve been talking about. Plus I think a bit of old-fashioned ‘handmade’ craft is exactly what differentiates both this logo and a small business like Carsonified. Old-fashioned doesn’t necessarily give me a negative feeling, it might just mean doing it properly.

Think the imperfections help differentiate it from the aforementioned ‘C’ beverages. Plus the colour of the those beverages is as much the brand as the C/swoosh combo, as long as you avoid ‘Coke red’ or ‘Carlsberg green’ you’ll likely be ok.

However I’d be tempted to tidy up the Carson (perhaps leaving out the cross-hatching) and allowing that to act as your metaphorical hyphen between Carson and ified.

My initial instinct on seeing the logo was to have the ‘ified’ be handdrawn in style and maybe return to a ‘machine drawn’ Carson. Although on second thought I’m not sure how that’d work. It sound and look a little clichéd, but might be worth an experiment?

I do think the swoosh on the 2nd hand drawn logo requires some smoothing, I find my eye drawn to the ‘pinch’ that Wez mentioned. Brian’s eye for detail on the letter spacing is also pretty bang on. But that’s bound to happen from a first or second draft, interesting to see where you take it from here.

Great videos by the way, nice to see you have the time to share your work with us all. That’s such a good approach to have.

Best of luck . . .

A&F is not good company to have; A&F is basically a really expensive generic brand; it is the frat boy analog to “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”

If you cut off the “ified” completely then the logo would improve at least 100%.

Cursive is seen as increasingly feminine today; it has been a LONG time since I’ve seen anything handwritten by a guy that wasn’t block lettered. Cursive is something that I also consider to be antiquated, old-fashioned, and oblique. A love letter from my girlfriend or a note from my elementary school teacher to my mother would be written in cursive. Anything that we actually write is going to be printed. Is that the type of evocation you want?

Nitpicking:

The tracking between the “a” and “r” is too wide; the right side of the “a” should not be concave.

The tracking between “i” and “e” is _way_ too wide. It looks like the “ed” is falling off.

The tracking on either side of the “f” should be more even.

I don’t understand why some letters are connected (“Ca”) and others aren’t; especially, why connect “if” but not “fi”? Similarly, I think it is a bad idea to mix block and cursive letters.

Th relaunch of MTV’s US site is a great example of how to avoid creating a brand and overall aesthetic that leads to a company being pigeon-holed. They came up with the concept of a site “hat” – a playlist of user-submitted site headers that loaded at random on each refresh of their page. The result is a strong site feel that remains perfectly recognisable as the big daddy of the MTV family, but serves to strengthen the brand by suggesting that their look and appeal is one that wears many hats, caters to all and still celebrates its userbase; some concept very much in line with your own.

I’m not necessarily suggesting that Carsonified go the same way, but your developing logo would lend itself very well to the concept. With a medium as diverse and ever-changing as the web, why can’t online logotypes be just as amorphous? (You’d need something fairly static for print, of course – electronic paper is some way off it seems!)

Of course, you’ve probably got your work cut out designing one logo, without having to think of a handful of site header variations based on it…

More info:
MTV dot com: http://www.mtv.com/
MTV hats blog: http://hatsblog.mtv.com/

I’m feeling the overall look, and wonder how it would compare with a, and i don’t mean this in a derogatory way at all, tidy descender?

Great idea to document this process and great work!!

I like the way you are posting everyday. It’s interesting to see this evolve.