Epic Logo Contest - Fella

Back in 2008, DA announced a potential new logo and a contest accompanying it. At first, I looked upon this with tired eyes, since the new logo that TheRyanFord et al have created is excellent. Not only would it be a shame to waste it, but also challenging the community at large to beat it was in my opinion a bit of a tease. From what I currently see in the submissions, about one in 100 is good, and one in 500 has a reasonable chance of being picked. Eventually I decided I would not let depression make me shy away from another challenge, so I started drawing, and I ended up with this.

Look, it's Fella! aka The Creative Process

The dome-shape of the original dA logo is obviously very familiar, and many people have ended up with similar-looking 'da' attempts which look like the letter S when rotated through 90 degrees. I sacrificed easy letter recognition for the bigger goal - giving the logo a set of eyes and horns, it became a stylised likeness of our established mascot.

The logotext took ten times as long to make as the mark, and I'm still not sure I got the look I wanted. I'm not a typographer. I started off with the font Chambers Sans OT which I had in reserve for its techy look. I only had the italic version, so I needed to skew it back! Then, I converted most of the angles to be closer to 45 degrees and chopped off several ends to produce spiky-looking letters that are still smooth when looked at closely. As with the new logo concept, the 'ART' part of the text is uppercase but has the same base height - it would be a shame to waste that good idea just for the sake of originality. I used one of my other favourites, Calibri, and then made it much thicker. I changed the angle of the R and added a spike to the A to make it look more like the Chambers font.