Zoo Portfolio project

 While I have been reading through the book assigned for this course, Against the Clock, at the end of each lesson and project there is a series of prompts that give you instructions to build content for your portfolio, after each lesson I have been going in and doing little thumbnail ideas of each project. For this project the book asked us to make a few logo icons for different sections of the Cincinnati Zoo, then listed off a list of different parts of the park to be included. In this project I drew out 3 different ideas and then rendered my two favorites.

So here I drew out three ideas, Sky, Arctic, and Ocean. Ocean had no direct inspiration, it started out as a doodle of a wave and some lettering and then slowly became an implied fish shape, with the wave being the arch of a tail, the fin out of water, and then the fins on the bottom of the surf board. In the end I did not render this one, as I felt it would have came out to cluttered, now after finishing the project, I believe that this one would have been a better choice over the Arctic. For the Arctic I drew some inspiration from one of my former jobs, Snowcat Ridge, while working there, I spent a lot of time breaking down their logo in my head, as I feel it captures the nature of the park quite well. In my design I changed the location of the trees and added some mountains, as long as adding shadows within the lineart, here I went with a sharper typeface, trying to make something similar to the Eagles logo from the NFL, later in rendering, this proved to be one of the most difficult designs to replicate properly, unfortunately it didn't come out as intended. For the last sketch, I did sky, this time drawing inspiration from several different "bird teams" the NHL and the NFL have a variety of teams with bird logos, and so I wanted to try and spin that into my own style.

For the final renders I did go into color schemes, just kept them black and white for now. Arctic, like I mentioned previously was the hardest to work with, I was quite happy with how the mountains came out, however the hand done letters were a nightmare to work with, as the pen tool did not want to cooperate, next time Id like to work more on getting a better overall shape in the logo, and to fix some of the clipping issues with the strokes, or maybe edit a pre-existing font. The sky logo was my favorite to make, the pen tool actually worked with me on this one it feels like, it made nicely curved, yet sharp shapes for the feathers- the overall shape is also nice, as it has nice spacing for the text. To fix this logo I would like to take out the cloud and have the Zoo title slightly overlap the image, and to fix some of the spacing between "sky" and the bird.