A Simple(ton) logo

My brother James asked me to draw him a quick sketch of a beaten up clown face a couple of days ago to act as a logo for his band 'Punchdrunk Simpletons'.

I'd just started using Adobe Illustrator to letter my 2012 art so thought I'd try it out for designing the logo. I've no idea if this is how logo design is meant to be done, but this process worked for me in this instance:

Step 1: Circles, shapes and pen tool in Illustrator : Step 2: Add details in Photoshop (mostly using my custom blood brush). This is the colour layer only shown. Step 3: Reshape the outline as needed and add features (this unfortunetly means they are not part of the vector image, and so can't be upscaled without losing definition, but they were last minute additions and the entire image is big enough for my brother's needs anyhow.
Step 4: Paste the image back into Illustrator and add the letters. Excellent comicbook letterers Blambot, have a fonts page (which has just changed it layout apparently), that allow some of their fonts to be downloaded for small press or non-profit use. So James and his band may need to get a new logo when they're famous but since they wanted to wear T-shirts with a logo on in this Friday at their local gig, I used Blambots BADABOOM sound effect font. I outlined the font and ungrouped each letter so I could jiggle them about a bit, to give a more random look to the letter positioning.

Speaking of great letterers, Nic Wilkinson pointed out that the clown above has a big Crosshair eye, and coincidently James was the inspiration for Crosshair when I drew him in Cancertown. Some sort of weird creative circle closing there.

And thats it. This is certainly not a post to learn anything from, but I thought someone may be amused by my haphazard approach to my first logo design process. You can see the logo with a black background at http://www.punchdrunksimpletons.com/

BTW this little video helped a lot with learning the basics of illustrator lettering and Balloon tales is a great site for helping with those odd details like files formats and tranfering between programs.

If you're in Belfast this friday (28th Anugust) the Punckdrunk Simpletons are playing Rossa Club, 8 O'Clock, Supported by Dead Parrots and Dead Presidents. £4 Admission.