Songwriter Institute Logo Evolution

Songwriter Institute Logo Evolution

Songwriter Institute connects amateur writers with seasoned, successful hit songwriters in sort of a music camp/retreat setting. The creative brief for this logo simply said, “The Song is King” and the creative director wanted some kind of crown. I looked at lots of crowns and started sketching.

She said no musical notes so I had to get those sketches out of the way first.

There really are a LOT of ways to draw a crown. Budweiser does it really well…

More crowns, starting to visualize how the type might fit in.

The second part of this project was creating a mark that could also be used with the letters SWI alone. They envisioned this as an emblem on shirts or hats.

I tried a few ideas that were waaaaay out there while also refining some of the stronger concepts and their variations… my creative director and I chose our favorites and then showed those to the client.

I was ready to move to the computer when I got a call to halt to presses, they’d changed their minds and wanted to switch the concept to “Free Your Song.” An hour long brainstorming session gave birth to a songbird bursting free of its cage, which we decided would work really well for the website rebuild too…

Back to the beginning with bird moodboards. I’d never drawn lots of birds so this was a fantastic opportunity to get good at it. But the W concept from the crown was harder to pull off with a bird… I still tried to make it work.

Bird sketching commenced, quite pathetically at first…

Interestingly, the bird they liked the best was drawn on only the second page of sketches. Sometimes it takes drawing many more of something to realize you had it right at the beginning…

I started to play with some personality and explored several kinds of birds…

Adding the text as a design component… and then asked again if it was possible to use the bird with open wings as a W? Not really. Also trying to incorporate a cage but it became obvious pretty quickly that this was too much detail for a logo.

The last image shows the choices that were ready to go to the computer. Alas, the job was cancelled at this point. Still, it was a lot of fun to learn how to draw birds with attitude!

Categories:
Sketchbook