I began brainstorming by sketching symbols that represented my family. I also began to sketch different crest shapes to see which ones I liked.

After sketching and coming up with some crest shapes and symbol ideas I then sketched two roughs to help me put my ideas together.

This rough represented my family, which has many physicians in it, by having a stethoscope around the crest. This is the rough that ultimately was the basis for my cross.

This rough was modeled after purple drank which is a popular beverage (especially among the hip hop community) in Houston, Texas where I am from. This crest however I deemed not worthy enough to be put into illustrator.

Now with a good rough to base my work on I moved onto Adobe Illustrator in order to create my final piece. I went with the stethscope around the crest and this was the most difficult piece of my work. It took a long time to get the curves even and to reflect this to the other side of the cross. By far the hardest part however was creating the piece that wraps around behind the cross as this involved correctly placing two curves. After this the rest of the crest was fairly easy to create compared to the stethoscope. I ended up with three iterations varying color, text, and the presence of the stethoscope in my piece.

Font was another thing that took me a long time to get right. I spent a long time searching through different fonts trying to find the style that I liked and I finally settled on a font called "Governor" from losttype.com and I put one space between each letter of my name so that it took up a good amount of space. After experimenting with different iterations of my crest I found that I liked the one with the blue stethoscope and gold crest the best. I dealt the colors worked the best in this one along with the text.

In the end my crest looked like this: