Neil Berman of 1st Class Driving School approached me first with a request for a website.
He had a domain set aside already, but it was a “Coming Soon” page with a large version of the graphic on the business card he handed to me. I looked at the graphic and my first impression was that it was probably stock clip art, and I saw an opportunity to help him out with that. So I offered to do a logo for him too, if he’d like.
I’m glad he agreed; it was one of the more fun logos I’ve had a chance to do in a while, and I actually got to draw it by hand, since he wanted a more cartoon-like look for the logo.
He wasn’t really sure what he wanted, which can be a good and a bad thing when a client says this. Good, because the Canvas of Possibility is so wide and open, you can feel free to stretch your imagination. And bad <em>because</em> it’s so open; there’s no real initial idea for the designer to draw from, so you may waste time and money coming up with designs the client doesn’t like rather than pursuing what they do.
So it was a relief when he told me he wanted to keep the Red Porsche in the logo somewhere. Now I had something to work with. I found the clip art Porsche he had on the business card on another Driving School’s website, and knew it wasn’t a good idea to use it any longer. While I had no doubt that it’s just a clip art image floating around the net, it’s safer just to assume it belongs to someone and come up with your own. And frankly, it just didn’t look very well done, in my opinion. So we needed something crisper, cleaner, and something that looked like it was drawn by the same artist. What better way for me to make it look hand-drawn than to draw it by hand?
Like I mentioned in the 1st Class Website post, the logo looked more like it represented a car dealership than a driving school. So I added a couple of traffic cones to represent a parallel parking test.
I didn’t want the Cartoon theme to reflect in the logotype, however, because it was just too much. So I stuck with a sans-serif typeface, and chose Trebuchet MS after experimenting with a few. It’s web safe, and not a terrible typeface in print.
Neil also wanted a circular version of the logo for “Student Driver” window decals. I prefer the horizontal version, but this works nicely for space-saving.
And finally, the logo was complete. 