Elephants and Icons

"Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing." - John Donne

It's logo creation day! The exciting craft of finely tuning iconography with fonts and textures and shapes and colors and spacing and kerning and tweaking and screaming at your software package for not being able to convey what your mind sees. You grab the lines little end-node and you move it here, no here, no here, no here, no here, no, wait just a minute this is what we started with, maybe its this node over here.

Repeat at nauseum...

Logos are design at its most frustrating. They are compact and small canvases that have so many demands placed on their little heads. The dynamic little icon and text duo has too look great on the side of truck a building the moon but it needs to be flexible like a Ring-Ling Brothers contortion act, for should you need them small they need to perform a shrinking act with out all the bellyaching of an image or a photograph. You see somewhere in China on a grassy hill top is an old man who may just very well end up painting that logo you designed on the side of a grain of rice to be presented as a gif of accomplishment to the president of some company who's logo you just bled over.

One of the handful of elephants that makes the Toronto Zoo its home. Photographed as the gentle beast made its way into a shaded are to escape the summer heat. I have always found their eyes fascinating, they seem to look sad and burdened, as if carrying the burdens of the world on their backs.