Red Leaf Media

Background

When I first started Red Leaf Media, I quickly worked up a logo.  It looked like this:

At first I was content with the design.  It was unique and somewhat professional looking.  However, as time went on there were several things that did not sit well with me.  First, the logo felt somewhat "center-heavy".  The thickness of the leaf in the center outweighed the thin lines of the text.  In addition to this imbalance, I frequently received comments about the leaf looking like the canadian flag.  I honestly did not once think about this while designing the logo, but I could clearly see the similarities once it was brought to my attention.

As my uneasiness with the logo grew, I was hesitant to make any changes; I don't like to second guess my work.  However, there are times when change is necessary and even beneficial...This is one of those times.  The Red Leaf Media brand is still relatively young and malleable.  I can experiment with the logo in these early stages with minimal impact on my business and customers.  As such, I decided to forge ahead with a new concept.

From the feedback described above I knew that there were several things that I wanted to both keep and change.  I wanted to keep the red color and the leaf concept for obvious reasons.  However, I wanted to provide more visual balance between the text and leaf in addition to simplifying the leaf shape.  With these concepts in mind, I began working on a new logo.

Initial Steps

I fired up my favorite program for logo design, the free and open source program Inkscape.  I usually start logo designs with simple text in order to emphasize the company or organization's name.  So, I began with a very basic "red leaf" form:

I chose a simple, sans-serif font known as 'Bitstream Vera Sans'.  I like this font, but the letters looked too narrow to me.  So, I made the font bold:

This was looking better, but the letters and the words seemed to have too much whitespace between them.  So, I tightened up the spacing between all of the characters:

This looked okay, but there were several aspects of the design that needed attention.  So, I worked with some of the details of the letterforms to create this:

There were several changes to note.  First, letter "e" in both words was seperated by its following letter via added whitesapce.  Additionally, the "f" in "leaf" was altered significantly to fit with the look of the logo.  Lastly, and most significantly in my opinion, the "a" form was altered to include a leaf outline.  While this aspect does not immediately draw the eye, it does accomplish my initial goal of tying the text and the leaf together in a visually balanced manner.  A curved line was added down the middle of the leaf outline to provide the visual cue that there is indeed a leaf within the "a".  Lastly, I put some final touches on the logo:

The changes here are obvious: "red" is put in what other color but...red, and the word "media" is added to the right.  At this point I was quite content with the new look.  I felt as though it accomplished all of the goals that I set out with, and looks good.  Here is a final, slightly spruced up version of the logo:

I still haven't worked out what shade of red I want to use, but I like the concept in general.  Hopfeully the website should start using a finalized verison of the new logo soon!