Thing FX
Logo brainstorm session

An old friend is a special/visual effects artist and has recently started up his own business. He sent me some logo ideas that he had been working on himself. After giving him some feedback, I couldn’t help but play around with a couple of his ideas. The first idea he was working with was monster imagery and eyes. The second, was the idea of a ball bouncing down stairs. This was a reference to physics simulations of reflective balls bouncing around sparse environments which has been a ubiquitous trope of special effects since computers were introduced.

I played around with bringing the two elements together into a visual that oscillated between looking like a monster’s eye before flipping to look like a ball reflecting an environment involving balls and stairs.

A pupil in the dead-centre of a business card produces a slight uncanny effect. There is also a suggestion that the ball is on the move—bouncing around the page.

One of the interesting things about this project, at least for me, was the process-based approach to the typography. I started off with a boring setup and tried to progressively make it more dynamic just by stretching and twisting it. Although the end result was maybe something of an early 90s throwback, the progressive process was simple, interesting and informative and, could be repeated using other different simple manipulation techniques.