My First Logo — Nicholas Huggins

I was recently going through some of my old work and I found what is possibly the first logo I have ever created. To give some background to the logo I will give the story about what it was for. At the age of around 17, a friend (Anthony Alkins) and I decided we were going to start a T-shirt printing business. We decided that it will be a good venture to start in an effort to make a bit of pocket money. We had achieved a small amount of success spray painting images through a stencil onto the t-shirts of fellow students during the intercol season, and figured this was a good step to take. After a little bit of research we decided that the best and most efficient way to print t-shirts was screen printing. We got all our equipment (ink, silk, built screens, etc) and wrote down a list of ideas to put onto these t-shirts. Our idealistic view was that we were going to print t-shirts that we would want to wear ourselves, and of course people will flock to buy them. Truth be told, we did sell quite a few of our own ideas, but for the most part, people came to us with their own ideas for us to print. This turned out to be our biggest money maker. Before we printed a t-shirt, we needed to come up with a brand name. Something for people to recognise us by. This was my first foray into branding and at this time I had no clue about anything in the world of graphic design. Being the "artist" in the business I was tasked with drawing a logo once we came up with the name and the name we eventually chose was BCKWRD Designs.

Come time to create the logo, I made a bunch of sketches and eventually created a finished drawing with a marker. I then scanned the image and coloured it black in photoshop with the help of the magic wand tool and the brush tool. At this point I had no idea what illustrator was, and very limited knowledge of photoshop. If you asked me about raster graphics, I would have assumed you were telling me something about Bob Marley. With the little skill possessed, a logo was eventually created and we started printing. We achieved relative success with the business, and we printed a few afternoons every week for the next 2 years or so, we were even featured in an article in the newspaper as well as a local talk show showcasing youths who were doing things out of the ordinary.

This early experience with graphic design eventually led me to choose graphic design as a career and I was fortunate enough to study it in detail for 4 years at SCAD. I think one of the positives in the early BCKWRD logo is the handmade feeling, and it is what can be achieved through sketching before going straight into illustrator and using a font found online. When designing always consider a youthful naivety in the sketching process, and this will show through in creating original designs that does not look like any old logo found on behance or pinterest. Check out the finished logo below.

Here is some process work that I found in an old folder. From an initial sketch to the finished drawing that I would have scanned in.