Like most of the rest of the twitterverse I got a chuckle out of the “Horses and Bayonets” meme from the Presidential debates. However, even though it hadn’t been long the design community and print on demand sites were flooded with less than stellar images for something so “epic”. I took it upon myself to try and develop the “logo design that Horses and Bayonets deserves”.
Concept Development
I sketched a few quick thumbnails of what I wanted the Horses and Bayonets logo to be like. Proportions and framing were going to be very important. I knew that I wanted something mostly symmetrical for the design, also knew that it had to lend it self well to fitting on a Graphic Tee or some other type of apparel.
I looked over a lot of different poses for horses and decided that I wanted an action pose of horse rearing with hooves in the air for this logo design to feel like it had some movement to it, I didn’t want it to feel static. The bayonet’s were a simpler matter. I decided to focus more on sharp crisp edges than on intricate details, also this would reduce the time involved.
Logo Design in Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is the best overall program for logo design. Many designers (and I used to be one of them) prefer to use Photoshop even from the very beginning, but this isn’t practical. Additionally knowing that I wanted this design to be able to easily work for several different purposes, formats and mediums later, Illustrator was definitely the way to go.
Placement was definitely something I had to work out over time while doing this. I wanted to convey using positive and negative space, the optical illusion of the horse presenting as a unicorn. This actually worked out better than I expected, while maintaining enough of the bayonets for them to be easily identified.
Production of a Logo.
When you are not working with a word mark logo, the production portion of a logo design isn’t too complicated. You just need to verify that it works in black and white as well as color, clean up the vector shapes until you are satisfied with them and make sure everything is aligned correctly. After that you simply need to export the correct file types. If this were a logo that utilized a word mark you would want to make sure you had a live type version and a version with all text converted to outlines.
Final Logo Design for Horses and Bayonets
The final logo design translated well and came out better than I thought it would. This was all done very quickly and I intend to build a “complex version” of the logo later as well as do some more advanced apparel designs with it. I also intend to do a poster design tutorial using this concept and show how Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign come together in a print work flow, and how to prepare a PDF poster document for printing and preflight.
If you’re interested you can buy a Horses and Bayonets Graphic Tee at my Zazzle.com Store. If there are other products you would like to see developed for this concept or you have ideas for it let me know via comments or email.
