So the Olympics are returning to London -for the third time- meanwhile, Chicago has never hosted. For our Designing Computer Graphics class, we were to redesign the logos for either the 2012 Olympics, the Detroit Zoo, or Orlando International Airport, all of which have hideous logos. Then we made 5 icons for said logo that were similar in style. I went through a quite a few designs and lost a lot of sleep, but in the end, I was thinking too big. They worked well as art (I still might use them down the line) but not so much as logos. Finally, just scribbling on my Wacom (I practice my handwriting whenever I’m bored), trying to think of something, I came up with this swirly font and incorporated a simplified version of Big Ben. It’s funny that just a few lines, a circle, square, and triangle are enough to convey a representation of something so grand and ornate as Big Ben. Same thing with icons, I doodled and tried to think simple. I noticed that I could use the shapes from my logo in my icons. Arguably, all the shapes in the iconset can be found in London 2012, but I mostly used to the ‘L’s, ‘2’s and ‘0’s.

I’ve also included my alternate project for the Detroit Zoo. I worked on both at the same time and the London one came out slightly ahead. But I’m including them here just because I think they’re too good to go to waste. These were sketched on a trip to the Orlando Zoo and then traced over in Illustrator.

Done in Illustrator CS3