Maybe it’s because I am a graphic designer who has worked on a lot of logo projects, but I feel like there is a sense of “officialness” that descends upon an endeavor when the logo is done. Not that the endeavor was any less real before, but once you have a logo… you are in business.
So I guess it’s official now: Mint in Box Press has a logo!
So how does a logo come into existence, exactly?
Well, first things first, you have to come up with a concept. Think about what the business is, what the name is, and if there is a way to express this in a symbol, the simpler the better. Does the business already have a logo? What’s good about it that can be kept, and what needs to change? If they don’t, is there anything, any mental image that you can come up with, that could represent what the company does and who they are?
In the case of Mint in Box Press, this step was already done. The name comes from the expression used to refer to a collectible that is in the best possible condition, suggesting excellence, and we were already using this picture of a literal mint in a literal box (haha, get it? wink wink) as a de facto logo, which gives us imagery to work with, as well as a color scheme. Because this concept was good, but a bitmap image has its limitations (it is not scalable, and uses too many colors, just to mention a couple of things), I figured the best course of action would be to transform this picture of a mint in a box into a simplified icon that could be used as a logo.
I had this idea percolating in my mind for a few weeks, but much like with writing, the real progress on developing an idea for a logo only happens once you put pen to paper (or pencil to paper, or fingers to keyboard… you know what I mean). So I started making some rough sketches by hand just to see where this would go. Immediately I noticed an issue. Can you tell what it is?
In the first few sketches, I went for the open box with a mint inside, just like our picture. But here’s the thing… if the box is opened, the contents are no longer “mint in box”, right? So I shifted gears and started to sketch the box closed. You can see how I went from the low profile box like the one in the picture, to an isometric, cubic box with a lid, to a simpler isometric cube shape. Then I started playing with the negative spaces using the lines of the cube and the shapes of the mint, and I arrived at what I thought was a good solution. From this point, I could move on to a vector graphic software where it’s easier to make uniform shapes and duplicate them to try out different combinations.
In this phase, the main challenge was to combine the mint shape with the box shape in such a way that they don’t overlap weirdly. Then it was a matter of figuring out the right proportions for each element. I thought I had it when I got to the symbol you can see in the image above, the rightmost one in the third row. But then I thought… can I make it even simpler? I was afraid that if I removed the color difference of the “inside” of the box, the visual effect of the mint being in it might be lost, but I tried it anyway, reaching for that simplicity. And look at that, the illusion did not fall apart! One final adjustment on the proportions, and that was it for the symbol!
Now we move on to the wordmark – this is the “written” part of the logo. This phase involves choosing the correct font and distributing the text in a way that looks balanced in conjunction with the symbol, both for the vertical and horizontal signatures (symbol and logo stacked on top of each other, and side by side, respectively). I didn’t save process images of the main font selection, but I did have some studies for the placement and formatting of the word “Press”, which you can see below.
And yes, you may have noticed that these studies were done with the previous version of the symbol. Much like writing a story and editing it, designing a logo is not always a linear process, and sometimes you will go back and forth between the pieces until you have one final cohesive whole.
One more thing to keep in mind at every step of the process: making sure that there are no accidental “hidden images” with negative connotations within the logo. For this one, the symbol vaguely reminded me of a Mandalorian helmet. Considering this crowd, though, that is definitely not a negative association, so there was no need to rework it. It’s actually kind of a happy accident that might make the logo even more fitting for Mint in Box Press – just check out this photo of our founder Selena Jones cosplaying Bo-Katan Kryze from the series “The Mandalorian” at San Diego Comic-Con 2022.
There is still a bit of work being done, like some scaling tests (as in, how small can the logo be until it’s just an illegible blur), and defining monochromatic and negative versions (seen below, for use when the background is one of the main logo colors, or when printed within a black and white document, like, say… the title page of a book!!!), and creating a brand guideline document that will spell out what the exact colors we’re using (in RGB and hexadecimal for screens, and CMYK and Pantone for print), and fonts (both the specification of what is the font used in the logo, and what fonts should be used for the text in supporting documents), and what’s the proper minimum surrounding space around the logo, and, and, and… as you can see, it takes a lot of work to look this pretty, our logo doesn’t just wake up like this 😉
In the next few days you might see this new logo showing up on our website and social media, and hopefully soon you will get to see it in the pages of our books as well! I can’t wait! 🙂
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