New SouthernGFX Ident logo

I settled on my ident design. A big thanks to Wayne Robson, Glenn McGuire and Oran parker who gave me either inspiration for this little project or design ideas. I decided on the compass point idea for a number of reasons:


1. It's very simple and as a stand alone shape it can mean lots of different things.
2. The link to a compass point (pointing south) is a reference to my name. It doesn't look so much like a compass point in it's final form that it becomes cliched (Like a rip off of the Safari logo for example).
3. The shape has ended up looking like an alien (sort of) which gives me the link back to my work
4. I tried the shape out on a card, pin badge and as a web icon and it seemed to work well in all formats.


I'm not overly worried about colors at this stage. One of my first design sheets focused on getting the colors right before the shape. I realized that the color should be secondary to the symbol and that I may be changing the color to suit the medium anyway eg. black and white on cards, greenish tint to suit the website etc.

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January roundup

I always try to end a year with a clean up of the website and hard-drives so that I can hit the ground running in January. For some reason I was a little late this year and only got round to it three weeks into the new year. It's a little different this year actually as in 2009 I switched over to 100% Macs and and 100% external hard-drives. No more Windows in nice and the thought of less OS installing and fighting viruses is just liberating. I wonder what the addition of a new Apple Ipad with bring to the party in two months time.

Ok, projects in January. Things started out a little slow for the first two weeks. I carried on learning to handle Cinema4D and just added to my skill set. Before Xmas I hooked up with Sparkle media on a new project to provide a character modeling service under their Sparkle Media banner. One of the first pitches was for a female Werewolf. The pitch went in and the last I heard they were down to the last 4 so fingers crossed. I've just updated my Linked-In profile to reflect the work I've been doing with Sparkle. After some discussing I've gone with the slightly grandiose title of 'Creative director'. Here's hoping I can live up to the job!

If you need character/creature modeling and animation work doing, contact Glenn at Sparkle.


For some time now I've been wanting to firm up my brand image I've been toying with the idea of developing an icon or ident to use on my websites, blog, cards, pin badges etc. I asked a few friends and designers for some tips and came up with a few ideas. The recuring idea seems to be linking my name, SOUTHERN, in with the design. I've tried the whole Southern Kanji idea in the past so that was a non starter for me. I decided to go with the South compass point reference. Here's my first sheet:


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