Local Oregon country music artist, Clint Wilson, contacted us to help design a logo for his new new group musical project, Whip Wilson.
The original logos provided to him, while they got him by for a while, were of odd formats and not suited to the wide array of uses a good band logo needs: stickers, t-shirts, drum heads, etc.
Sticking with the same theme of Whip's face and a bowler hat, we developed a much cleaner, multi-use logo for him as his band grows and evolves.
Original Logos
Original Logo #1 is rasterized making it not scaleable-friendly.
Original Logo #2: An improbement on #1, but still lacks a sense of "serious big band brand"-ness.
Our Design
We started our design for Whip with hand drawn sketches at a consultation meeting. We wanted to stick with the theme of a bowler hat and face silhouette. You can see in the first sketch photo below we even played off of the two original logos and did a face, with bowler hat, AND two "w"s constructing the face.
This was further explored by putting the name Whip Wilson in place of the head's face but this was just too René Magritte The Son of Man (Sketch 2).
The ideas of playing off the Double W initials was thrown around but ultimately nixed because it was too easy to compare them to Wonder Woman, Waylon Jennings, or WWE's logo.
Ultimately it was as simple as turning the head silhouette from a front facing view to a profile view (photo 3) and everything else just fell into place.
Sketch 1: Logo ideas begin to flesh out in sketch form.
Sketch 2: Remember that famous painting with the apple for a face and the bowler hat?
Sketches turn to profile view of the head and bowler hat.
Rough outline work in Adobe Illustrator is done over reference photos.
That's right folks, we modeled the logo directly after the lead singer's face.
Logo Refinement
After the initial sketches and outlines were laid out it was a simple matter of refining small pieces of the logo like font and stars.
We decided to have 13, 5-pointed stars, incorporated into the logo much like the original Colonial American Flag, as Whip Wilson (Clint) is a veteran and avid patriot.
The letterpressed font was a little too cliché so we went with something a little "racier" and ultimately think it looks better.
After those were adjusted, we mapped out 3 different versions of the logo, in both black and white, for Whip to use:
- Full logo with name, head and stars.
- Just the head and stars part of the logo for stickers or merch.
- Just the name and stars in an American flag-esque layout.
Only 12 stars in this mockup, too many points, and font looks too cliché.
Three different layouts and mixes of the logo's components in both black and white.
Mockup of the new logo on merch to give a good idea of how it'll look in use.
A new logo was born
And just like that folks, Whip had himself a sweet, pro-level, new logo!