Logo Design
Indigo Frontier
My good friend Dylan Waller was a talented musician while we both studied at App State in Boone, NC. I was still a young and idealistic graphic artist working for free coffee. When Dylan commissioned me for his album artwork, I had no idea I’d be revisiting this design so many years later to develop a logo for his frontier market research firm. I must begin by highlighting the inspiration for both designs - then and now. Photos can’t do the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains justice, but I’ve been persistent in trying over the last decade. Their hazy blues and purples were a gorgeous well of natural colors to draw from.
The mountains are calling.
The original design began as a canvas painted with watercolors. The canvas texture and watercolor rivulets formed a strong foundation for the album art. After importing a photo of the canvas into Photoshop, I traced some contours of the ridgelines in the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. I used these contours to make shapes out of different areas on the canvas and applied a drop shadow effect to achieve some depth.
We’re taking this logo to new heights.
How do we get a sharp, minimalist logo from a highly textured watercolor painting? I took cues from the name of the business: Indigo Frontier. These two words give us the two elements we have to preserve from the original drawing. Indigo certainly implores me to sample the blue hues from the original artwork. A mountain frontier is rugged, unexplored, and rough around the edges. The jagged edges of the mountains in the design stay, but the dark stroke outlining the ridges is a bit much, so I removed it to allow the background to create space between the peaks.
Once I converted the mountains into solid vector objects, I applied a slight gradient to the two peaks in the distance to preserve some depth. Something is still missing. The logo needs typography that is bold yet smart. The sharp angles of Josefin Sans capture some of the ruggedness of mountain peaks but also looks modern and sleek enough to be right at home in a market research firm.
It’s business time.
The logo really sings when applied to a background that is the same color as the foreground mountain. However, it’s hard to know how effective a logo truly is until you experiment with some real-world applications. I developed some fun, modern background patterns with wavy lines and solid color blocks from the indigo theme that resemble the mountains with a foreground area to feature the logo. I continued to play around with these patterns and subsequently fell down a rabbit hole of having too much fun producing a mockup for a special report on East Asia.
There's no such thing as "done".
One lesson I've learned over the years is that no project is ever truly finished. When you return to old work with fresh eyes and more experience, you will always feel that nagging urge to apply what you've learned and take it to the next level. Working with Indigo Frontier provided me with an opportunity to do exactly that with this design.
