Here’s the logo I did recently for CBM (Cheri Barner Management), my wife’s talent management company. In October 2012, Cheri left her talent management firm to start her own company. At that time one of the biggest messages she wanted to send was that, even though she was going out on her own, this was a viable and professional operation reflecting no drop in professionalism in any way.
The logo I made for her reflected that more business-like approach, but her clients and those she works with see her as a warm and open-hearted person and felt that aspect of her persona should be represented in the logo as well. So I went back to the drawing board and after some trial and error, came up with what you see here.
Having the C and B joined together was there almost from the very start, and the heart the B makes works well with her warm personality. But the M was tougher. Usually I like to have something look good on paper before I move to the computer to flesh it out, but I went through loads of sketches and nothing looked perfect. Sometimes you just have to dive into the computer and hope things will get sorted out there, and that’s what happened in this case.
Originally I wanted the logo to have more perspective, as if we were looking at it lying on the ground going off into the distance. To aid this I generally made strokes near the bottom of the logo thicker and those near the top slimmer. In the end I think that sense of depth I was originally going for only shows up in spots (I get that feeling a little bit in the B). Nevertheless, I think the changing strokes give it visual interest that would have been lacking otherwise.
And that brings up another point, which is this logo might not have been possible before Adobe CS5 (or at least a lot tougher to do), because that’s when Adobe introduced variable-width strokes. This is one of those “How did I get along without this?” kinds of features that can instantly add an extra level of sophistication and visual appeal to your Illustrator projects for very little effort, and which I’ll talk about in-depth in a later post.
As far as color goes, we chose something in a blue-green because it’s one of Cheri’s favorite colors and a reminder that she grew up in Santa Monica and has always had an affinity for the sea. All-in-all I think the logo does a good job of getting across Cheri’s warm personality while still looking professional.
