Michelle Ni

I focused mainly on fonts with serifs like Century, Garamond and Bodoni for my initial drafts because they helped balance the lines and curves in my initials. I followed two main ideas in this draft: straight lines (uppercase) and curves (lowercase). I noticed a bold font would be more legible when scaled and I played a bit with the way the white and black space interacted with each other.

Second round of logo design. I kept only one of the designs from the first round as my potential simple design (on bottom) and created a new one that played on curves as well as parallel lines. I decided to leave them black and white because color did not seem to add to the design. For my experimental logos (on top), I played around with angles and color. I still wanted to keep the straight lines but the bold made them look heavy so I experimented with diagonal lines to help break up the black space in the initials.

The final experimental draft. I decided on this logo because the other experimental logo looked like it had an 'i' after the 'n' and I wanted to stick with using only my first and last initials. I placed the white lines lower so people would be less likely to expect more letters underneath the initials and I shorted the overall design to balance the white lines. I also removed the serifs on the bottom to match the bottom of the initials and make it obvious that the bars at the bottom are shapes rather than more letters. Removing the bottom serifs also emphasized the thick black lines in the logo making it appear more stable and bold. I stuck to black and white because I wanted to keep the look simple and clean yet strong.

The final simple logo. I wanted to go for a elegant look for my simple design and thought that the curves from Garamond italics were the best. I had to adjust some of the lines and curves a bit so they would flow better. I excluded any other colors because there were a lot of curves happening in the design so if I added color, they would clash since both would be equally as 'loud' in the logo and be a bit harsh on the eye. This simplistic design has white space below the 'm' and above the 'n' to give it a light feel since some of the lines are a bit thick. I also included a white version of the logo to show that it looks good in other solid colors.