Steve Pliers: The Most Metal of Metalheads

Some time ago some Norwegian rando kept calling me Steve for some reason. Don’t ask me why.

Later me and some friends came up with stage names for ourselves for our hypothetical band. Everyone went with cool names, nearly all ending with either ‘Axe’ or ‘Chainsaw.’ Me, on the other, I went with the most Metal of tools in the repair box — the pliers.

Today, I felt urge to design a logo with a 1980s chrome look to it. Just for my own gratification and to find out for myself the steps needed to achieve such a look. And here’s what I came up with:

There’s still room for improvement, but for a first attempt, it turned out alright, if I say so myself.

This will probably be my last logo this year. In the upcoming weeks, I will just focus on cartooning and character design.

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Repuka: A Quest for Vindication

I made this as a birthday present to a friend of mine. It also marks my first real attempt at digital painting.

I still have a lot to learn, when it comes to painting, but I’m not completely green anymore (heh).

Is there anything else to be said about this piece? Well, actually, initially I had this idea for something a bit different than what you see pictured here. I once pitched this logo design that featured a gaping voodoo-like skull. But the band wasn’t having it. They told me they thought it would look good printed on an album or a T-shirt. But I held on to the idea of someday designing such a logo. Later, some other band said “no” to one of my design choices for a T-shirt design, telling me to overlay the logo on top of the graphic instead of below it, that it wouldn’t look good, otherwise. Again, I begged to differ, but decided to keep my further thoughts to myself and just get the job done. Here enters my friend with a funny nickname, Repuka, and whose birthday was coming. It gave me the excuse I was looking for to revisit these rejected ideas, if only to prove there was merit to them after all.

Toxocara, v.5.2

One day later … 

I asked my friends on Facebook which version they liked best. Most of them agreed that this time around, I actually improved upon the original design. One of them thought it would look even better if the skull were similarly colored to the rest of the logo. I indulged him, by trying it out (see below). Reactions to this one were very favorable.

I, however, thought that it would look better if all the letters were partly colored yellow, as seen below. This has the benefit that the semi-realistic details of the skull don’t get washed out. Not only that, the color gradient makes for more vibrant, almost fiery lettering.

One this matter, too, your feedback would be most welcome and helpful. So leave a comment to let me know what you think, and don’t hesitate to let me know what you like and what you don’t like.

Toxocara, v.5: How Many Logos?

Back in 2004, I was commissioned to design a logo for Toxocara, a Dutch death metal band (see logo below). It was one of the first major gigs I landed — “major” being relative here –, and the band members were enormously appreciative, handing over merchandise with every album release, which is why I hold the band in such high regard, even to this day. The band is now defunct, sadly — although their Facebook page recently showed some activity, so really, who knows?

Anyway. The logo was done entirely (save for one minor tweak) in an “old-school” fashion, i.e., with pen and paper, without too much thought behind it. This should be no surprise — it’s why it looks so rough.

Obviously some like it rough. The members of the band — and perhaps especially the driving force behind the band who had part of the logo tattooed on his arm — were clearly happy with how it turned out. Furthermore, an anecdote goes that Christophe Szpajdel, the “Lord of Logos” himself, once complimented the band on it. But me, I always felt I could do better.

Sadly though, my idea of better was far from what the members of the band thought of as better. Over the years this led to a series of uncommissioned redesigns (see below for an example), some of which were fine logos in their own right, others were blatant misfires. Eventually, I gave up on the idea of ever improving on my original design of the logo.

Fast forward to 2017. I’m now busy churning out logos for various projects and purposes; I recently got myself new drawing hardware; Toxocara’s Facebook page showing activity; one of the band’s key members had his birthday yesterday … The time seemed right for one more attempt. And this is what I came up with.

This time, I tried to stay as close to the original as possible, changing only those things that seemed “off” to me. Mind you, it’s still far from perfect. But at this point, it’s more of a proof of concept than anything else. Which brings me to the biggest change to the design, which is of course the skull in the top center of the logo. It’s not just a fun nod to Toxocara’s album AtmosFear, I was also curious to see if I could incorporate a painterly skull image in a logo design instead of “sporting” it too with figuratively drawn skull (see below for an example). I think it looks okay, good even. But what do I know?

So, uh, let me know which version you like best. Do you like the original logo or the redesign? And what kind of skull image do you think goes best with a logo design — a painterly one or one that is figuratively drawn? Or do you prefer your logos simple, clean and tight, without any graphics at all?

Marquis of Snakes, V.2

Remember this Marquis of Snakes-logo I posted a few months ago?

Well, anyway, I was never really happy with how the letters turned out. So I decided to re-do them — from scratch. At the time of writing, I’m about half-way done (see below) — and it shows an improvement over the original lettering.

Last time, I didn’t get around to adding all the graphics that I originally intended to add. This time however, I already went ahead with sketching the demon in the back of the logo (see below).

I’m really looking forward to finishing this logo. And if you’re excited as I am to seeing this one finished — then stay tuned for future updates!

Chorus of Torments: Behind the Design

Last night I finished designing this logo here. I don’t really have anything to tell about it, other than it’s portfolio piece. I just felt I needed another strong black metal logo before trying my hands on a new genre.

 

As for the name — Chorus of Torments, I remember coming across it in some book, I don’t know which one, and I figured it would make for a cool name for a band, real or imaginery. And I sketched something out on a piece of paper, which yielded the following result:

As you can see, I made some changes to the original design, hopefully for the better. The biggest change was the omission of the figures on top of the logo. Personally, I thought it would be nice to have an image of people suffering complement the logo (see the sketch below) …

But some people whose judgment I respect advised me to omit it because they felt it be too on the nose and harm the readability and printability of the design. Right now I’m inclined to agree.

 

Wergild: Logo Breakdown

There’s a new black metal band in town called Wergild and I was asked to design a logo for them — which is what I did. Below I’ll break down the process of designing it.

Full disclosure: At the time of writing, I’m not sure if any of the logos seen here will see actual use. But that’s not relevant for this breakdown.

First thing I did was establish a sense of symmetry. Why? Because black metallers usually have a hard-on for symmetrical logos.

I liked the logo’s silhouette, but something was amiss with the overall shape of the letters. The letter “W” in particular bothered me. As you can see above, it reads more like a “C” or an “N,” so I needed to remedy that.

Also, I decided on making things a bit more jaggy and messy-looking. Generally speaking, this is not a must per se. In fact, plenty of black metal logo designs are neat and tight in design. But one of the band members expressed a preference for something a bit more illegible.

The problem, however, with textured letters is that they don’t look as good when you invert the logo. (The reason, of course, that logos get inverted is because band shirts are usually black.)

So one simple solution is to simply keep the letters black, placed on a contrasting white background that follows the silhouette of the logo.

 

As you can see, I also added some goatheads and a screaming skull because — just because, really. No, that’s not entirely true. It’s part homage to Christophe Spzajdel, the self-proclaimed “Lord of Logos,” whose logo-designs for Horna and Tsjuder have been of inspiration to me, and part conscious design choice to help improve the silhouette.

Slave Machinery, Same But Not Same

A friend of mine suggested I make some changes to the way the “S” connected to the “L,” and I felt she might be onto something. So I tried it out by giving the “L” a slight portrusion on the bottom. And while I was at it, I also tweaked the outlines a bit and flattened the coloring a bit to make it all more even and balanced.

For comparison — here’s the previous version before all the tweaking.

Let me know which version you prefer.

In the meanwhile, I’ll continue with my next project(s).

 

Slave Mastery, V.2

A few days ago I began on a journey to improve my thrash game. At the time of writing, I was under the impression that I never tried my hands in designing a thrash metal logo. But sometime between then and now, it came to me again that I have actually tried to design one — on two occasions, no less. That is to say, I have been commissioned twice, by two different thrash metal bands, to design a logo. Both times I failed to deliver what was expected of me.

The thing is, at the time, I believed in a one-size-fits-all approach. I had developed my own signature style, and though it was really only suited for black and death metal, I was confident that I could make it work for any band in any genre of music. But I know better now. Now I know that if you want to design a logo for a thrash metal band — well, it’s probably a good idea to design a logo that could pass for a logo a thrash metal band might actually use!

Now, after a few days of practicing, I’m confident that I have the skills necessary to design a proper thrash metal logo. And to prove it, here’s Slave Machinery, v.2!

Alright, so we’ve got a thrash metal logo. What can I say about it?

Well, for starters, I ‘ve always liked the whole idea of a single-tier logo with blocky, angular letters that are — really or seemingly — connected, using a thick line underneath or on top. Not only heightens it the sense of solidity of an already solid typographic core — it also adds a bit of zest to an otherwise perhaps humdrum, type-like logo. Not that there’s anything wrong with that per se — it never held Iron Maiden back from making it big. But then, they have one of the most iconic logos in the “metal mainstream” — or period, for that matter. I’m only saying, think about all the angles, reflect on what you can do to make your logo more interesting or more appropriate to the genre.

When I say you have to think about all the angles, I mean that quite literally. I’ve been looking at a lot of logos of 1980s and retro-inspired thrash metal bands (like, e.g., Dark Angel, Sadus, Toxic Holocaust, Violator), and I found that most are entirely composed of letters with angles instead of curves.  It is important to note that this is by no means a hard and fast rule. One of the bigger bands in the thrash genre, Exodus for instance, has a logo with hardly any angled straights to speak of. But all this probably isn’t news to anyone entrenched in the scene. What might be surprising, though, is that you will specifically find a lot of 30-, 40-, and, to a lesser degree, 60-degree letter angles.

Looking back at my previous version (see below), I feel that I at least got the angles right — but that’s the only thing that’s right. My biggest grip with it is that is too wavy. The constant up and down undermines the solidity that I feel a thrash metal logo needs to have. I also feel that it’s better to have but a few outlying accents extending into to open surrouding space, because an undulating mass doesn’t make for a strong silhouette.

One thing I haven’t talked about yet is negative space. Negative space is the empty space that surrounds an object or, if you will, a positive shape. I once read somewhere that the negative space is what makes people make out letters. I will come back to this later when I discuss black metal logo design, but suffice to say here that when you’re designing a thrash metal logo, you may want to reduce the negative space to a bare minimum, aligning them and squeezing them together — ideally to the point where you can practically only make out the letters by looking at the negative space in the letters themselves. And that’s another problem I see with the logo above. While the spacing between the letters is satisfactorily small — to me, the letters don’t feel boxed in enough.

So those were two of the things that I tried to remedy with the re-design, and hopefully I succeeded. What do you think? Which version do you like best? Let me know in the comments.

Slave Machinery, Day 3.

I’m still obsessed with improving my thrash game. But I’m beginning to get the hang of it. I know now the right angles, and I think I know how to handle the negative space.

Hopefully, sometime this weekend, I get to finish the logo — one of them, and then I’ll write some stuff on how to make one yourself.