In Search Of: A Signature

I've been struggling for a lonnnng time to come up with a suitable cool looking signature logo that I could use on my illustrations and design work.

It seems like it's always easier to come up with a logo for other people than to design one for yourself.

For a long time I had it in my head to make a logo that looked like one of those square red symbols on Chinese prints, called a "chop." Chinese artists carve small wooden stamps of their name and stamp the bottom corners of their paintings. Don't ask me why I went in that direction. I suppose because I've always been interested in Asian culture and thought it would look kewl (note: the image above is not the one I tried to make for myself, but just a generic example of a chop).

I went through probably a hundred sketches over a period of months in an attempt to make my name resemble Chinese characters and yet still look like English letters. Needless to say, this was easier said than done. I was going absolutely nowhere with this concept, and then one day it dawned on me-- I'm not Chinese. So why was it I trying to make an Asian looking signature?

So I scrapped that plan and started over. After more sketching and dead ends I finally decided to go with my interest in all things retro. I looked at logos of various toy & game companies from the 1960s and designed a logo based on them.

I finally have a signature logo I can live with, but this it's by no means set in stone. For one thing the text under the main logo is almost unreadable when the logo is printed small. I need to figure out a solution for that. I'll probably keep tweaking it from time to time until I think it's perfect (which, if things go the way they usually do, will be a couple decades from now).

Designed in Illustrator.