Shark
Videogame logo.I built a videogame prototype as a tool for my Masters. It was important (to me) that it 'felt' like a real game. Thus, a logo was necessary.
Design need
Game design is complex and time consuming. Even as something as simple and rudimentary as the one created for my Masters can take considerably longer than you might expect, looked at without conext. Indeed, mine did.
This project honestly didn’t need a logo. But it wasn’t just a project, it was the realisation of an idea originating some ten years prior. With an ever growing list of personal and professional responsibilities, it was entirely likely I wouldn’t go back to this upon submission of my thesis. So, I wanted to make it as close to a ‘real game’ as I could in terms of presentation.
So I decided to give it a logo – as if that would somehow distract me from the fact that the game itself was merely a prototype.
Honestly, I’ll take any excuse to draw sharks.
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Design process
The logo itself is loosely based on one I mocked up for another game I was working on with Tom Vine, entitled Breach.
I had worked the form of a great white shark’s head into the ‘A’ on that one. I figured this would potentially work even better here since the A appears right in the middle of the word.
As I’ve mentioned – it really didn’t make any sense to invest a considerable amount of time into this, given my other priorities. I therefore put it together over an hour or so, while sat in an airport lounge (the eggs were divine!) while waiting for my flight to South Korea for SIGGRAPH 2022.
Everything was done on a single canvas in Illustrator, as represented by the image below. The font was kept largely the same, but for some waves added to the top of the S and R just to give things a little more variety. The mouth was by far the trickiest element and I eventually abandoned attempts to keep it straight (as you would expect of the horizontal line in a capital A). There’s an argument to be made that the gills are superfluous and complicate the image, with which I disagree. I think they make the overall form of the shark more identifiable and likewise better balance out the white space at the bottom of the A.
Long story short – it does the job.
Development of the logo over the course of two hours