Help, please: Design Of New Engraving Company Logo! Help/Criticism needed!

[ARGYRIS]

So after running a fairly successful jewellery manufacturing workshop we decided to take a month from manufacturing and focus on working on the business instead of working in the business...

We figured out that we could launch a separate company purely dedicated to the great and all powerful art of hand engraving.

So I am a bit rusty on Scrolls and Designs If you guys could take a look at the designs and give me some pointers I would greatly appreciate it! Thank you

 

[Memorymaker]

I like the first one the best .......... Looks good to me

 

[JJ Roberts]

I like the second one more detail,that's a winner. J.J.

 

[sam]

I prefer the left one. I would also adhere a bit closer to engravers script, especially for the shapes of the lowercase letters. They're not bad, but could be better.

The bottom of the L in school should go a bit lower, and I'd have some whitespace under all of the letters in SCHOOL.

 

[speeedy6]

Show it to people that doesn't know what it says. Sometimes a person can get so fancy with the style that ,while they can read it because they know what it says, a stranger might have to look at it a while before they can see it. At first glance, I thought I saw an '' e " on the end of the top pic and a " t " on the end of the bottom word school.
I like the bottom style. It's even and uniform on left and right.

 

[monk]

your layout is nice and graceful. but--- if you're going to focus on hand engraving. i'd suggest a more conventional script that was a bit more bold than the one you drew there. then again, maybe you want to break outta the mold. the entire matter centers on enjoying what you do.

 

[Memorymaker]

Actually ....... The word engraving needs work in both logos

 

[tolesh]

the second one reads a lot better. Try by glancing quickly at each one.

 

[Tim Wells]

I like the first one best, I think it has more artistic flair but both are good ideas. The rest of my critique has mostly been covered already.

Leaving some space below the word school would help, maybe curving the end of that word a little more to more closely follow the curvature of the banner... It won't need much space but it looks better when it has a space there so the letters don't look like they're sitting on anything but floating by themselves. Also what Sam said about the script letter style. Fatten up the places where the bright cuts would be (beauty cuts, upstrokes, whatever you want to call them) they are vital to the appearance of this style. Grace is everything.

As I looked at the first one my immediate thought was that it would make one heck of a neon sign for your business.

 

[dhall]

Tim touched on this, but given the asymmetric flow of the border/surround in both versions, the "Old School" text on a straight line is visually jarring for me. I'd capitalize on the flow of the border and banner and have the base line of the text follow along, with a minor amount of air space above the banner. Or, if you want to have the banner deliberately overprint some of the main type, do it more aggressively, and don't just clip the very bottom of some of the letters. I don't think this is what you want, but if it is, be bold about it. Years ago I had a design instructor who would characterize this as a "near-miss". Sam uses a similar principle when overlapping scrolls. He doesn't leave any question about it, they really overlap!

On the second design, the inset gem profiles on the left and right borders need a bit more air space so they don't get lost in the flow. I'm not a big fan of having the larger gem profile at the bottom being off-center. I see that you're keeping it approximately centered on the banner, but it's off-center to the overall design. The way the left and right bottom lines flow up to the stone and recurve seems to be crying out to be in the mechanical center of the design. Since the banner is sort of a visual overlay, it seems odd to modify the overall design by shifting the stone to the right.

On the whole, I think I prefer the first version, but both have merit.

Good luck with your design and new business venture. It's a big yet very important decision to step back and take a hard look at your business and determine that some recalibration is in order.

Best regards,
Doug

 

[mitch]

...if you want to have the banner deliberately overprint some of the main type, do it more aggressively, and don't just clip the very bottom of some of the letters. I don't think this is what you want, but if it is, be bold about it. Years ago I had a design instructor who would characterize this as a "near-miss". Sam uses a similar principle when overlapping scrolls. He doesn't leave any question about it, they really overlap!

Best regards,
Doug

excellent advice for all sorts of design situations. don't ever leave the viewer wondering if the overlap was an accident. do it like you meant it.