Creating a brand identity design for a friend.

My friend Matt makes really beautiful things; knives, chopping boards, whatever takes his fancy. He asked if I would design him a logo that would look great as an actual brand (with a branding iron) to be burnt into his creations. Obviously, I was happy to sort him out and came up with this.

I wanted his new brand identity design to have a vintage look to compliment the hand made work Matt does, I also wanted the logo to encapsulate itself with a flourish and the natural option was a handwritten logotype.

I used a dip pen with Indian ink, the dip pen gives a wonderful contrast of line weight and is perfect for a flowing handwritten look. A bonus of drawing by hand was that the imperfections of the ink bleeding into the paper lends itself well to the image, rustic look I wanted from this logo. When converting this to vector I made sure to keep as many of the rough edges as possible, removing only the odd-looking nodes.