Negative Space is Your Friend

As a writer for the local college newspaper, the Trojan Times, I felt inclined to offer my services as a web designer when they transition to a digital-only format. Currently I'm in the process of debating the hosting service: whether to urge them to purchase a host, jump the hoops to use one of those college newspaper hosts, or encourage them to use Blogger itself as a content management system. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I was aware that they were in need of a new logo, so, being on something of a roll (and it being my birthday today, so I'm full of junk and in a good mood), I went ahead and designed them a logo. I'm not only pleased with how it came out, but I'm downright proud.

The design came to me as one of my life-saving inspirations out of nowhere. I used a picture of a horse and a picture of a Trojan helmet to get everything aligned just right, then did the necessary tweaks to make everything fit. However, I had some initial trouble with people not seeing the horse's face, instead only noticing the long helmet. Adding the horse's cheek fixed that in a hurry, as well as added clarification to the negative space that makes up the helmet's main form. As for the typography, I used a free font called Title Wave. I played around a bit before arriving at this finished layout. I'd initially played with "The" sharing that enormous T along with the rest, but quickly decided that was a bad idea. The orientation of the "rojan" is just such that one can easily see the word "Trojan," thanks to its near-central orientation. The closeness to the T and how it is placed above "imes" ensures that one reads it first, while the lower alignment of the enormous T with "imes" allows "Times" to pop out as a word as well. It's just a perk of the font that the J happens to drop just enough to fit into the M like that. Win!