Creating Fake Band Logos

About two years ago, I had a project that involved creating a fake brand, for a band, as part of my A level. This one one of the first times I had ever designed a logo before!

Below are some of the logos I designed, and this was my journey.

I created all of these logos in Adobe Illustrator, it was my first time using the software so it took a while for me to learn how to create shapes and work with the tools given too me.

First I started my research, I wanted to create an indie pop/rock band, so I looked at bands like Artic monkeys and their logos for inspiration. I picked up on a few common conventions such as dark colours, bold text and the use of symbols.

I started by writing my band name "Before Dawn" - apologies to any real bands that may be called this. At first I thought it could be good enough on its own, but I started to hate the minimalistic design. This is when I decided to create the effect of a sunrise, by combining shapes to get a thin semi-circle. This created the design shown on the right.

However something still felt like it was missing. It didn't look like an official band logo to me.

I fiddled around a bit more and added a black circle underneath the logo to give it something to stand out against, however the lines didn't match up - the white bordered semi circle clearly doesn't fit. This just looked stupid and unprofessional so I tried once more to fit it up.

I continued to fiddle round with Illustrator and eventually decided to cut off most of the circle, and clear up the edges of the white bordered semi circle, so the two shapes merged. I fell involve with this logo. Not only does it look slightly like a sun rise, I was able to picture it on products such as posters and CDs.