kirkcudbright | hunting the chicken fish logo

This week's assignment was to "use a reductive process to create an abstract ID or logo from a recognizable image or symbol." This is probably the most abstract thing the instructor has said all semester, and the results can be fairly abstract, but the theory isn't.

This was the starting image, a championship rooster from the Mother Earth News website.

Step 1 is to use Illustrator's Live Trace feature to render the image in flat black & white. I would have removed the background, and played with the Live Trace settings if I was going to use this image in full, but that's completely beside the point of this exercise.

Close up of the eye. I love what this did with the nubbly texture of the comb.

In the end, I decided this was too busy for a logo, and extracted a series of shapes from the neck (lower left corner above).

This is a real company. "Omega Protein Corporation is the largest US producer of fish oil and protein products from menhaden." These are a herring-like fish near the bottom of the food chain, so overfishing at this level has predictable knock-on effects in the Chesapeake and mid-Atlantic. (Mother Jones, Greenpeace, Virginian-Pilot)

Omega doesn't need me to design them a friendly logo (they already have a friendly logo), but this is just what the shapes suggested to me. The thing about this sort of exercise is that I can design a client for the logo, versus the real-world case of designing a logo for the client.