Dragon logo design process

I've got a fun project to share today! A few months ago, Sarah, one of the girls from my Bible study, asked me to design a logo for her and her fiance. He roasts his own coffee and she really wanted a logo of a dragon roasting a coffee bean to put on the bags of coffee he gives people. Even though logos and graphic designs are really not my specialty, the project sounded so fun that I figured I'd give it a try. Fast forward to this week, when I finally finished up the project and sent Sarah the completed logo. I'm super happy with how it turned out and wanted to share the design process here. Make yourself a cup of tea and get comfy, because this post is loooong!

Pretty much all projects start at the same place, the scrappy, terrible idea place. Trying to visualize what a dragon roasting a coffee bean actually looked like was daunting and it took me a good 10 pages to come up with a decent solution. Here are some early, horrible attempts.

I arrived at this design, which I really liked, but decided to press on and see if anything better came along. Many pages later, I had three ideas that seemed pretty good. I sent them to Sarah to see which one she liked best.

She picked A, which also happened to be my favorite. Once I had the over all direction figured out, I needed to refine the idea into a solid, well thought out concept. That took more paper.....

Finally ended up here. I added a pile of "hoarded" coffee beans for the dragon to sit on. I scanned this sketch into Photoshop and made a color blocked version.

I experimented with font placement and then asked Sarah what she wanted. She opted for the text above.

At this point, I was still really struggling to make the pile of coffee beans look like a pile of coffee beans and not just a random pile of ovals. I took the problem to my friend Nicole, who works with graphic design stuff. She very wisely suggested making the pile of coffee beans a more contained, distinct shape, rather than having it bleed off the image. The idea perfectly solved my problem! :-D I tweaked the design and ended up with this.

I knew at this point, I was pretty much ready to start the final rendering. Sarah suggested a few more changes, then I printed out the rough comp, traced and inked it on a new piece of paper.

I scanned the drawing into Photoshop, filled in the areas that need to be black, made a few minor adjustments and declared the project done!

Over all, I'm very satisfied with how it looks and Sarah loved it! ^_^ 

Anyway, thanks for sticking through to the end of this post and letting me share the project process with you!

onward and upward,

Bethany