CLIENT
Amigos Cleaning Co., a cleaning business (via K6 Media)
Project Rundown
This was a pretty straightforward project. The company was called Amigos Cleaning Co., and I was asked to create a character-based logo.
With a name like “Amigos”, it comes as no surprise that the client wanted the character to have a “Latin” feel. We decided to create a Latin-looking man proudly holding a mop, with some kind of banner in front of him.
My first sketch was intended to be a fun “Spanish”-looking character. Ugh. It ended up being a car crash between a terrible “Mexican” stereotype and Super goddamn Mario:
Just brutal. There is a saying that applies here: “The first draft of anything is shit.”
But the nice thing about first drafts is that they help you find your footing. We decided to make the Amigo look less cartoony, more realistic, more handsome:
We liked the overall feel of this, but we decided that this Amigo was too hairy, too hunky. So, I cleaned him up a bit:
There we go! This Amigo looked friendly, responsible, and nice. Bingo.
This was that sweet point in any design process where you kind of “click in” into the right solution–where, even though the work’s not done, you feel that you’ve connected with what it needs to become.
The next sketch was a sort of general refinement. I traced over the previous sketch, refining the Amigo while building in what would be the true shape and layout of the banner. You could think of this as building the walls in a new house:
Then I traced over that, with more careful and precise vector line-art:
The difference isn’t dramatic at first glance, but if you study these last two sketches, you can see how the artwork became cleaner, sharper, polished.
Next, I worked only on the banner. We realized that it wasn’t really tall enough for the company name, so I redrew the banner, and then inserted the company name:
And with that, the “drawing” part of this logo was done! Next, I added color:
…and then added some subtle shading to give it a bit of dimension:
And that’s it! I’m quite happy with this logo. Clean, colorful, fun…and thankfully I think we avoided unpleasant stereotyping, too.
Here’s a GIF visualization of the whole design process:
…and, as always, remember that it’s important to make sure that your logo, even a moderately complex illustration like this one, works in one color!
IN ACTION
Once I handed off the logo, it was integrated into a website design:
…and I helped integrate the logo into a vehicle wrap:
