New ArtByArr Logo - Case Study

I designed this website 5 years ago and first published it soon after. It's had some additions and minor changes since then, but overall has maintained this look and its original text logo (at the top menu) for awhile. I wanted to make changes to some things, neaten up the site in some ways, and make a new logo. These past months, I was always at an impasse of how to exactly change it into something else. Something that I thought was better than I had. I liked what I had, which is why I've kept it the same for this long.

My previous website logo (2014-2019):

This logo has served its purpose. I liked how the 'ART' looked hand-drawn. I liked how the 'ARR' looked like a typewriter font. Yet, there could be improvements. 'Productions' was an afterthought, which makes it disjointed. The three fonts are not-standard and cannot be recreated in all text editors. I wanted a logo that I could always use across any web and print platforms-- regardless of font availability, web browsers, and even weird formatting changes not made by me but made due to error in domain editor updates.

I'm not a skilled hand-letterer designer. Doing it by hand, however, seemed the best route to accomplish this. I've always been a doodler. And I think messing with fonts and writing styles is somewhat easier and more in vein with doodling than still life in ink. So, I took my shot at writing my website name different ways with different pens.

And, I wasn't super happy with any of them. I did decide, during this process, that I wanted to keep the 'Art by Arr' as three distinct styles, like the original. It was easy to distinguish each word. I wanted to keep them similar enough though, to not be distracting. I didn't want to overemphasize the 'by' like the original logo which acted as the divider. I wanted the other two words 'Art' and 'Arr' to be the focus and the 'by' merely the bridge between them.

When you keep writing the same thing over and over, the words tend to blur, appear alike, and lose their meaning in the process. If you just look at how the words are written, though, each letter observes its own subtleties. The phases written never actually look exactly the same, as the last. As humans, I don't think even at our best intense attempts, can we make an exact copy of something made by freehand drawing. There's always just a slight difference, a nuance in how your hand sits, the pen's angle, the pressure, the stroke. Despite the basic lettering being the same in attempt-- each word was different each time you wrote it freely. And nothing I wrote as a group I liked, but I did like parts from various others I had sketched out. So, I manually edited the words by cutting parts out and made my "ideal" hand-written phrase for 'Art by Arr'. But, I still was missing the second part of it.

I didn't like the handwritten ideas I had for 'productions'. From a design standpoint, I wanted it to be apart from the above handwritten style. I tried computer fonts for this and it wasn't working. But then, I realized I didn't try non-digital fonts... i.e. fonts from analogue machines and letter-presses-- like my love of typewriters and their fonts. Something that no matter how hard you try to recreate digitally, you can't ever make it as good as the original. Unless, of course, you had one...

Luckily, I pulled out my 1930's Royal O, a design gem and work of art in its own right, to type out the final word. This model has a larger typeface: pica (or less characters per inch, 10 compared to Elite's 12). Aha! That's what I needed. I wasn't done yet, I still had to decide between all capitalized letters or not. I decided on the later.

After a scan into the computer, for both pieces, I put the two lines together. in my editor-- making some slight adjustments for contrast and color. Something was still off-- the logo's balance needed adjusting. I decided to do some virtual letter cutting for spacing adjustments on the typewriter face portion. After that was done, I was fairly happy with the result.

My current website logo (2019-present):

And thus, now my new text logo sits at the top of this page. I think I'm going to keep it awhile. It's literally got my hands all over it-- via my handwriting styles obviously. But also through the words I typed-- how each typewriter key pressed the ink into the paper at various pressures under my touch. I think that encapsulates what my work is: a story to tell and its unique details of being my own creation, a.k.a. art by arr.

I went through a lot of trail and error with this. Knowing it wasn't right yet and not knowing how to fix it. But as with any of my previous words of wisdom here and continual self-reminders, I'll say it again: you'll get there, you just have to keep creating.