Logo Love

A few months ago, I was asked by one of my all time favorite photographers, Ben Hallissy, to come up with a new logo design for his photography business.  Other than a few t-shirt designs, I hadn’t had much “branding” experience so I was excited to be able to add a bit more graphic design to my portfolio.  Not only is Ben a good friend of ours but he was also our wedding photographer (the photos are just amazing).  Our relationship helped a great deal in learning to communicate Ben’s artistic style, consistently high level of quality, and professionalism through his logos.  Ben also happens to be studying Aerospace Engineering in graduate school (impressive, I know) and he was hoping to incorporate that part of his life into the logo.   He came up with the idea of incorporating a beta symbol into the logo and this is what I came up with:

The clean lines of the square contrasted against the organic, hand-drawn Beta communicate just the right amount of visual interest.  Along with a masculine color palette and the clean lines of the square aligned with the text, the logo overall suggests the clean, masculine, meticulous yet relaxed feeling that Ben was looking for.  I also created a few, slightly more organic alternatives which he also liked:

With a similar color palette and text alignment strategy, this script logo is a bit more organic but slightly more generic given the initials rather than beta symbol.  I still love the contrast of the handdrawn “bh” with the clean typeface below.

This last logo I did for fun — I decided to invest in a tablet because it was becoming too difficult to draw with my finger on the laptop mouse.  I played around with creating various signature logos and I loved the result.  Though it doesn’t hit on all of the qualities that the first logo does, I just think that there is something so classic and beautiful about signature logos.

Which one is your favorite?