For my Photoshop class this week we were asked to create a logo for a non-profit, “deal[ing] in green initiatives in Los Angeles” and which seeks to “aquir[e] local business partners [and] overall awareness of green intiatives.”

I decided to focus on one of the greatest environmental threats to L.A.: water. I thus created a brand name of H2Angeles with it being a “Water policy and education center for the Metro Area.”

Some constraints with this project were the necessity to use Photoshop (PS), which made the process more cumbersome and less elegant.  Logos are best designed in Illustrator, since they can then be scaled to any size with an incredible sharpness, and because Illustrator has many helpful tools for such work that PS lacks or has only rudimentary relatives. An additional constraint was to utilize one of the base shapes she provided in a file.  I chose to use the shape that you see as the leaves, and which also comprises the water tulip. The water tulip is made by taking the leaf shape and flipping a copy horizontally, altering their rotation a bit and linking their layers.

I also created my own rain drop shape for the center of the logo using the pen tool and added a sun behind the image to better offset the image and give it a little more dynamism.

For the text, I chose Cooper Hewitt Heavy for the tagline since it’s a nice thickness and can stand out well, providing easy legibility. I also chose Aclonica Regular for the H2Angeles, and changed the tracking to 70 from 0 to provide a less cramped feeling to the text, and help emphasis on the title.

All of these efforts provide a nice draft of logo that could be further explored upon client approval.

To create the greyscale image I duplicated the layers, merged them and then utilised a black and white adjustment layer while tweaking the properties of that layer.

To create the reverse I started by duplicating the layers, put them in their own folder, and added a black background to ensure that it still looked good. Which I think you can agree that it does. But considering that there may be other color combinations that may cause a problem, I created the “fried egg” medallion with a white oval background behind the logo, and the wordmark slightly shifted right.

For embroidery, I would suggest dropping the yellow sun and instead using a yellow fabric, this reduces the number of thread colors needed, and still enhances the brand.  For screen printing, I could see the logo being full back on a white shirt. If H2Angeles was to add another location or expand into a new service, I would drop the second line of the tagline and add the new information there. And the tagline could be seamlessly updated if it was changed in the future.