Being familiar with drummers and having been in a band myself was a big plus. I was inspired by the movement of drum sticks while a drummer is playing. Seeing this movement in slow motion creates rhythmic smooth curves and shapes which also reminded me of those found in signatures.

With this information in mind I listed a few keywords which could describe Joseph’s personal brand:

• rhythm
• personal
• signature
• curves

First phase is sketching. A few sketches and some character variations later and I had a clear direction of where this design was going.

4 simple tools: sketch book, pencil, ruler and permanent marker. The stroke width of the logo depends on the width of the marker, so it’s important to get this clear from the start while the texture on the paper defines the texture in the type.

Scaling the idea to such a large size can be tricky and after a few failed attempts, I realised that a baseline and some guides would help. I set a baseline and lightly drew each character in pencil. I used these as guides and get my hands comfortable when drawing each character, since I’m not familiar with writing at this size. I did 3 more versions always using the same baseline height (this will be useful at a later stage).

Off to the scanner. I scanned all versions and opened them up in Illustrator.

This is where the Tracing Tool came in handy. I used the Black and White logo preset as I only needed a high contrasting output and played with the Threshold settings to get the best defined result. I repeated this for all scans.

Since I had drawn all characters on a baseline earlier, all the variations had similar x-heights therefore I could use different characters from all variations. This gave more flexibility and the possibility to choose the best characters to form one logo.

Finally, just add colour.

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