A friend from the Local Biz Builders forum has used me to do several blog headers this past year for her clients. Because I've had some real fun with her projects and she's a joy to work with, I asked her if I could showcase this project.

Last week she asked me to do a header that had what I thought was a pretty tired logo with boring clipart and some crazy font that was probably trendy when it was done.

As an old signguy, I lived and breathed lettering and the illumination of the letters for almost thirty years and I have strong opinions on what looks right, but I was also a little hesitant to say anything.

I mean why rock the boat, just do the header and go on to the next one.

I did a quick layout and decided I could freshen up the logo with some new graphics and type face changes. I needed something to write about, so I suggested that I tweak the artwork and offered to do the logo changes for the header for free.

I liked the overall layout, I just didn't care for the treatment of the typefaces or the clipart. This is the before image.

I wanted to keep the logo kind of the same so I started with the sun.

I liked the radial gradient for the yellow, but thought I should do something with the red.

Next I wanted to mess with the "easy day" copy. I kinda like welding letters together that overlap unless it makes them less legible. In this case I used a Bodoni clone and gave the letters a little dimension.

Now it was time to tackle the clipart. I have several GB of vector art that I've collected over the years and spent a few hours sorting through them looking for something I could use. The dolphin was easy, the marlin was a little elusive. Kind of like fishing for them.

Now we're talking. I chose a bold serif font for the rest of the copy and this is what I came up with.

Well, that does it for this article. What do you think of the changes I made to this?

Till next time.

Roy