The Risen Logo - Part2

He kept the central idea – the “S” integrated somewhat more elegantly by reflecting the body vertically and using a more contemporary font.

I offered to apply the correct finish to this design, and you can see the result as the third design in figure 2.

By the way, the gray background is there to check the readability – the logo has to be easy to read on both light and dark backgrounds.

Unfortunately, most viewers had problems correctly identifying the “R”, because it was very close to an “A”. It was predictable – but we hoped to be able to solve that with contrasts in the finish. Unfortunately, in vain.

Taking a step back, all of us thought that neither solution was characteristic enough or appropriate for the genre. Adventure was lacking...

Back to square one, do not pass Go, do not collect $ 200.

Make no mistake, logos are the heavyweights in design and rarely do the early designs make it to the final round.

Then I tried laying things out in every possible direction (very roughly) to see which one had the best reception.

Mike also took up a couple of these ideas – and started doodling himself (figure 4a)

You can also find these designs and rejected concepts towards the end.

Before I come to the final logo that resulted from this process, let me digress a little to explain how the cast metal look is created:
 

Once the form was there (figure 3), I used the layer effect in Photoshop on the extracted logo to create a relief with hard chiseled edges.

That creates a spatial effect.

You can find this option in Photoshop under Layers / Layer Style / Bevel and Emboss.

You can simply pull the metal texture into the image as a new layer, and copy it as a new layer in the Layer palette (multiplying the layers).
Now you just have to select the transparent area on the logo layer (magic wand) and delete the superfluous texture on the texture layer.

And there you have metallic text. That isn’t so hard, is it?

Of course, the real difficulties are once again in the details.

In order to get a believably aged impression in the metal, you have to experiment a bit with the paint tools and the burn tool, and highlight the hard light edges.
Scrapes and scratches can be made from light and dark areas with skillful use of the cloning tool, so that you only have to highlight the edges. (figure 4)

Since you don’t want to go through the whole process for every use of the logo, it is recommended that you lay out the graphic in a very large size right from the beginning.

As a rule, a width of 4000 pixels is enough for most uses.
But since I expect that we will also need the logo at a width of 5-6 meters for trade shows etc., I laid it out at a width of 9000 pixels.

If that isn’t enough, it won’t be possible to get by without a redesign anyway.

The final result looks like this (figure 5).

For the posters and the Internet presence, I created an even more spectacular version.
You get the glow around the graphic in Photoshop again under Layers / Layer Style / Outer Glow.

But, as a rule, that still looks very cheap, so I colored the logo and then distorted it with a central zoom effect – you can find that under Filters / Blur / Radial Blur.
Behind that is a lens flare that I created with Knoll Light Factory to get more details in the glow.

You can see the result in figure 6.

I hope you enjoyed looking over our shoulders...

Ralf Marczinczik
Art Director
Piranha Bytes