This is a thought that has been building from my frustration of working with logos, and my professor’s opinion that our graduating class, in general, is not very good at logo design. Thanks to doing some reading on David Airey’s Blog last night I think I’ve started to piece together my particular problem. And when it comes down to it, it doesn’t seem to be a problem at all so much as a result of academic misdirection that I can at this point consider resolved. 

My professor would strongly encourage us to not lock ourselves into a single idea, which is what a lot of people in my class would do almost instantly when developing logos. This is a good thing. I liked to do lots of thumbnails, and a lot of times I’d have many that would look the same as I was trying to work out an idea visually through multiple sketches with small variations between each. I had noticed no fewer than one occasion where my professor had told me to stop that because I was just doing the same thing over and over. I think over time I had complied with this idea and as a result began to sell myself short conceptually.

My professor also tended to pick the logos he thought we should work on from our sketches, not knowing if they were ideas that we liked or thought about. Sometimes things end up on paper, and then I stop thinking about them because it was just an experiment and I didn’t care how it turned out and had dedicated no thought to it. And then that idea would end up being my final product, and I wouldn’t know why other than “the professor said so.”

The entire point of the thumbnail process is to explore all your options, and if that means trying to fully work out a problem roughly BEFORE going to the computer, I’m all for it. Once I jump into Illustrator I tend to be restricted by the ideas that I’ve put to paper. Working from a half-developed idea would land me with a half-developed finished logo. 

I don’t think I fully realized what was happening until I ran across ideas that paralleled my own in David Airey’s process. First, I absolutely agree that you shouldn’t show sketches to a client, as they might end up falling in love with something that you hate. In a classroom setting, while an assignment might be for a specific company, the professor is still the client in the end. Showing the sketches to him would often derail ideas that I favored for those that he thought looked better. While he encouraged us not to become locked into ideas, he would basically lock us into them. He would also derail my thought processes by telling me to stop sketching things that looked similar, which is the lateral thinking part of the process. 

So most of the time I would move forward with an idea that I didn’t really like, that I didn’t do any further thinking about. Now I can’t blame him for my failure to keep thinking about these things independently, but I also was taking his advice more as rule, thinking that he was being guided by a higher design wisdom that I would be rewarded for following, and that I would gain understanding in the end. Instead what we all got was the judgement of being bad logo designers. 

And that is why now, after I’ve turned in my final project and am waiting to graduate in a few days, I am working on a new personal logo so that I can competently market myself. Lesson learned.