Monster Logos

In the Christmas holiday of 2019, I was staying the night at my Mother's house and chatting with the owners of Chaotic Harmony. We were talking about how much bigger 2020 was going to be after an incredibly successful 2019. In the midst of conversation they stated they really liked the Project Charm logo and it's bold graphic style. The idea for a CHI logo featuring a "monster" Timora (the company's mascot) came about and I pulled out my sketchbook and started doodling.

Attitude was what I wanted to breathe into this character. To me, Timora is a cheeky, trickster monster lotus who Rocks out to Jrock, letting their petals sway to beat. The owners adored the design and shortly after our first (and last) convention of 2020, Katsucon, I started crafting the full design of Timora.

I pulled the brand colors to generate a palette (seen in the second pic above). From there I generated petals and swapped colors to bring cohesive layering. Adding a stroke to the shapes helped me see that combining the petals into one layer left some trouble spots. I recreated the pats in seperate layers and layered them in to get the final image. Overall this gave the petals a rhythm.

I wanted CHI to be able to use this as a logo so it needed some typography to state what company this monster was repping. I looked into the previous typography projects I made for CHI and the visual styling of them didn't quite match what we were looking for. They didn't quite have the attitude and flair to match the monster. However, the bolder typography of the Project: Charm logo came close with it's bold colors and heavy-weight stroke.

Following the overall circular shape of the design I pull references from things like circular stamps, hanko, manhole covers, graffiti and monster cartoons to develop the visual style of the typography surrounding the monster.

The first iterations of the final ring of text was simple but we couldn't finalize one colorway as they seemed too different from the monster's layered look.

Taking reference from 70's logos I decided to layer up the type with alternating colors of stroke. Too many layers would result in a loss of the fidelity of the overall type but too few layers would feel lacking in visual weight. I referenced my favorite anime in the orientation of the text with the anticipation of animating the logo like the text in the anime. (I want to learn small ways of animating things like this so this project is definitely on my list)

Adding the two elements together gave me the finalized image, and with some layering adjustment I made the Timora monster "pop-out" above the text.

For use without the illustration I generated a text block.

Aside from use on promotional items, like stickers and business cards, the logo made its way onto a step-and-repeat style backdrop to use at conventions.