Creating the Florida Brand Logo

Making a logo is always difficult for people like me who aren’t the savviest with design programs like Adobe Illustrator. However, since Florida Brand is practically a one-man show, the only way to grow the clothing line is to put on my big boy pants and innovate.

When taking a road-trip with my family to Nashville, Tennessee, I had to occupy myself with something to do over the 12-hour ride from Tampa, Florida. I thought to myself why not work on some designs for the company. Before we left for the trip I went to Walmart and bought myself a brand new NotePad that had dotted lines that way my straight lines might actually have a shot at being straight.

So after spending some time on the notepad, I came up with this:

This sketch was an extremely rough draft of a logo but I still had hope. I’ve seen professional designers draw out there logos on paper, scan the sketch into a digital image, and then retrace the sketch using the pen-tool in Adobe illustrator. So, I followed the steps. I took this picture and imported it into Adobe Illustrator. After a couples hours of pen-tooling the drawing, the logo turned into this:

Yes, as you can tell, this is bad. Very bad. This pretty much just made come to the realization that I’m a terrible drawer and probably should have paid someone else to do the logo for me. But, it was too late for that, I told myself that I should make some adjustments to the logo and then see if I liked the outcome.

A week and countless file saves later, I ended up with FloridaBrandSerifLogo8.png. It may not be perfect but I am happy with it:

This was definitely a fun learning experience and at the end of the day only made me more skilled than I was prior to this journey.