Logo Designs from EnergizeIT Demo Competition

EnergizeIT was a lot of fun and especially got the crowd energized during the demo competition after the keynote in the morning. I had the opportunity to design logos for all three demo competition teams in Expression Design 2. I've never had any graphics design training, but playing with the design ideas and drawing tools, I found myself really enjoying logo design. Although I had to keep secret about the designs before the competition, I can share my design concepts with you now and introduce my two favourite features in Design.

Team: Connected Road Warriors

Team requests for the logo:

looks like a military badge
reflects software + service (i.e.Windows Live) idea

Design concepts:

warrior holds sword, replacing sword with USB cables
connects service (i.e. Windows Live) with software on the desktop
highlights software + service and places warrior with simple outline in the background
uses gold and blue colour and shadow to create military badge look

Team: Shell Shocked

Team requests for the logo:

uses AC/DC fonts
incorporates Powershell logo elements
hard rock look

Design concepts:

a burning heart that's bleeding looks hard rock and eye catching (I found the heart illustration in Office Clip Art)
places Powershell logo element (">-") in the middle of the heart to suggest "Powershell"
places AC/DC signature lighting elements on the heart to reflect the "Shocked" idea
vertical placement of the text is to make the look unified and unique

Team: Code Ninja

Team requests for the logo:

combines the idea of "code" and "ninja
simple and powerful
uses Japanese Kanji for Ninja

Design concepts:

I had a few ideas for the design and the final logo went with the one on the right with white box outline. My favourite design is actually the one with single katana (one on the lower left). On the blade of the katana is a string of "1s" and "0s" to suggest "code." The one in the upper middle has an interesting placement of the two characters which represent "Ninja." I filled one of the character with "1s" and "0s" again to suggest "code."

Throughout my designs for these logos, I really liked the "Colour Dropper" tool in Expression Design. Not only you can drop colours with existing colour swatches but I also used it heavily for capturing colours in real photographs then drop them into my drawing shapes. It's like magic. :) The second feature I found very handy is the "Selective Export" function. I was able to compose many alternative designs on one canvas and select any one or more components on the same canvas to export into different images types. No need to turn on or off layers to make sure you export the right objects.

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