Anatomy of a Logo

I recently unveiled a new planetz logo in the intro of my AC15 Comparison video.  Here’s the story.

In January 1999, when I launched my original website at planetz, I asked a brilliant digital artist friend, John Weir, to make a logo for me.   He used a Mac and an SGI workstation, with programs like Adobe Photoshop and Fractal Design’s Painter, and produced a really interesting and unique piece of artwork for me:

Years later, when I asked him how he had produced it, he couldn’t really remember all the details other than “massive amounts of layers, filtering, distortion, plugins, etc”.  And unfortunately the original file was lost, so he couldn’t give me a higher resolution version of it.

I really liked the rich colors, the cool “bubbles” and raking effects, and low-fi distortion of the characters making up the word “planet”.  But, I always wished I had a larger, higher resolution version of it, especially as I started to get into high definition video.  Also motivated by the shift to high definition video, I needed an image that didn’t crop so closely to the letters.   And I kinda wished the Z was a bit curvier too.

So I recently set out to reproduce the logo from scratch, in a larger high resolution format.  There’s no way I could make it identical, but I wanted to make something new, inspired by the original.

Using the free open source graphics editor GIMP (which has a lot in common with Photoshop), I spent countless hours experimenting and tweaking.  I learned a lot, and made some interesting discoveries along the way.  Here’s the finished result:

What follows is a detailed step-by-step guide for making this logo.    This is not intended as a tutorial, but more a diary that I can refer back to some time in the future, after I’ve forgotten how I did it.  I’m not a trained graphic artist, nor a Photoshop/GIMP expert- so some of the stuff I do here may not be the “correct” or most efficient way of doing it.   But if you can learn some tricks from this, then I’m happy to share!  I’ll assume a general knowledge of GIMP basics.

1. I started with a new empty 1920×1080 image (which matches the aspect ratio of 1080p video), 72dpi.   In retrospect, I probably should have made it way bigger, in anticipation of future applications.
2. Create a new 3-part gradient using the gradient tool.
   1. Open the Gradient Editor and create a new gradient
   2. Right click and choose “Split segment at midpoint”
   3. Select the left segment, and make a gradient from dark red 180016 to dark blue 031253
   4. Select the right segment.  Right click and choose “Load left color from left neighbor’s right endpoint”
   5. Then set the right color to a lighter blue 0a0059
3. Use the Blend tool from the toolbox, select this new gradient, and fill the background with a smooth red->dark blue->lighter blue gradient by drawing a line at a slight angle from lower left to upper right
   
4. Make a new layer above that one, filled with black.  Name this layer Clouds.
5. Filters/Render/Clouds/Difference Clouds, set Detail 1, X/Y size = between 2 and 3
   
6. Change the layer mode to Dodge.
   
7. I found some fonts I liked at Urban Fonts, specifically “Microscan A” for the word “planet”, and a loopy font called “G-Unit” for the big “Z”
8. Select the Text tool, font Microscan A, size 325, letter spacing 18.0.   And type “planet”, creating a new layer.  Call it “planet microscan”.
   
9. Make a semi random geometric brush to use in filling in the word “planet”.  To do this, I cheated and copied a small snippet of the original logo’s artwork into the clipboard. We want this distortion to be pretty lo-fi anyway, so this is ok.  In this screen capture, I’ve selected a small portion of the “n”.
   
10. Select the Pencil tool.  Click on the brush selection and choose the first entry, which is the contents of the clipboard.  Reduce the opacity a bit, and increase the scale.  Turn on jitter to about 1.75
    
11. Right click on the planet microscan layer, and duplicate it, and name it “planet distorted”.
12. Right click on the duplicate and select “Alpha to selection”.  This will restrict the pencil tools drawing to be within the characters of the word planet.
13. Now draw the pencil across the characters in a semi-random way to produce some distorted artifacts.
    
14. Experiment with changing the opacity, the jitter, the scale, and the mode (try hard light, lighten only, darken only) to further distort the contents of the letters.  Possibly make a couple different clipboard-brushes to use.  My finished “planet distorted” looks like:
    
    We’ll come back to the “planet” text later to add a more defined border, once the background is brighter.
    Remember that the original white “planet microscan” layer is still available, and you’ll see below that I have it set visible for many of the following screenshots
15. Next, we’ll add some lighting effects, centered over the “p” in “planet”.   Position the cursor right over the center of the hole in “p”, and note down the cursor position (shown in the lower left corner of the GIMP status bar).   For me, it’s 335,569
16. Create a new layer and fill it with black.  Call it Supernova.
17. Filters/Light and Shadow/Supernova.  Type in the coordinates for the center of the nova.  Set the color to a yellowish orange fire color like e7a639.
    
18. Now open the Colors, Levels dialog, and drag the left slider (input level black point) to the right to eliminate some of the extraneous glow and make the spokes more defined.  Also drag down the white point (right slider) a bit to over-saturate the bright center.
    
19. Change this layer mode to Screen, and lower opacity to about 50%
    
20. Now, make a second bigger darker supernova.
    1. Create a new black layer, called Big Supernova
    2. Filters/Light and Shadow/Supernova.  The position will still be the same as the previous one.
    3. Increase the radius and spokes
    4. Set the color a little darker, like cf8221
       
    5. Adjust the colors as before to remove some glow
       
    6. Set the layer mode to Screen, opacity to about 80% and position beneath the first supernova layer
       
21. Now for all those cool circles and bubbles in the original logo—turns out they’re basically a standard lens flare effect.
    1. Create a new layer, filled with black.  Call it Lens Flare.
    2. Filters/Light and Shadow/Lens Flare
       
    3. Adjust the color input levels to reduce some of the extraneous glow, by moving up the black point (left slider) a bit
       
22. Unfortunately, that got rid of some of the cool “bubbles” towards the right, so make a second lens flare layer
    1. Create a new layer, filled with black.  Call it Lens Flare 2
    2. Filters/Repeat “Lens Flare”
    3. Now select the Blend tool, and select the FG to Transparent gradient. Draw a horizontal gradient from about the center of the layer, to about the 75% across the layer.  This will erase out most of the left half of the lens flare
       
    4. Adjust the color levels on this second lens flare to brighten it up, by moving the white point (the right slider) down a bit
    5. Use Tools/Color Balance to make the layer more blue
       
23. Set both lens flare layers to Screen mode. Set the first lens flare opacity to about 75% and the second (bluer one) to about 90%
    
24. At this point, I also made a third lens flare layer, to highlight some of the other bubbles.  Optional.
25. It’s too bright around the “p”.  We need to clear out some of the glow in the center of the “p”.
    1. Select the first lens flare layer
    2. Select the Eraser tool, and choose the biggest fuzzy circle brush, and increase it’s scale by about 5.  Lower the opacity to 15.  Rub this around the inside the big red lens flare circle around the “p”, with a few extra clicks right over the center of the “p”
       
26. Eliminate a bit more of the lens flare glow around the left side of the layer
    1. Select the Blend tool again with the FG to Transparent Gradient.  Lower opacity to about 70
    2. Draw some short gradients angling in from the upper-left and lower-right corners towards the “p”.  Not too far, but enough to get rid of some of the extra glow
27. Time to make the giant Z
    1. Select the text tool, and the font “G-Unit” (which I downloaded from Urban Fonts)
    2. Set size to 900, color to f59f1d, and type the single capital Z.   Call this layer “Original Z”
       
    3. I wanted curvy, but the top of this Z is a bit too curly.   To fix it:
    4. Duplicate the layer and called it “Modified Z”
    5. Select the eraser tool and a large Circle(19) brush, and rub out the big curl, leaving a nice sharp point on the Z
       
    6. Duplicate this layer and call it “Modified Z- Motion Blurred”
    7. Filters/Blur/Motion Blur, and set length 50, angle 180
       
    8. Now, duplicate the original “Modified Z” layer again, call it “Modified Z- Very Blurry”
    9. Filters/Blur/Motion Blur,  and set length 101, angle 209
    10. Make sure the “Original Z” and “Modified Z” layers are hidden.  Save these for later just in case.  It’s always good to have a backup.
    11. Set the Very Blurry layer to opacity 28, and use the move tool to move it below and to the right of the Motion Blurred Z layer.
        
    12. Position these Z’s below below the microscan “planet” layer
28. To produce the rake:
    1. Create a new layer called Rake Center, filled with black
    2. Select the pencil tool, and pick a Circle (03) brush
    3. Zoom the window out far enough so there’s space outside the layer on both sides.  this will let you start and end the lines outside the window, so they draw all the way to the edges
    4. Set the foreground color to an off-white gray like 6b6b6b
    5. Position cursor to left of layer, click and release the mouse to anchor the line.  Hold shift to start a straight-line draw, and hold control to restrict movement to the x-axis.  Position the cursor to the right of the layer so the new line will span the old, and click again to stroke the line.
    6. Repeat this at random intervals, in a couple different shades of gray and a couple different brush thicknesses.
       
    7. To save some time, duplicate this layer above the first, change the new layer mode to Addition, and move the layer up or down a bit to produce a bunch more lines. Then merge the two layers together.
    8. Now change the layer mode to Dodge
    9. Duplicate the layer twice.  Call one Rake Top and the other Rake Bottom.  Set both new layers’ opacity to about 25%.  Use the Move tool to move the top rake up and the bottom rake down, so you have a big rake that covers the center half of the screen.
    10. Make sure these rake layers are at the top of the layer list so they dodge everything below
        
29. Now we need to erase some bits of the rake to avoid interference with the text.  Similar to before when we erased some of the lens flare around the “p”
    1. Select the Eraser tool, and select a big fuzzy circle brush, erase some of the lines at the top and bottom of the Z.  Let the lines enter into the Z just a bit.  And leave the lines drawing over the center part of the Z
    2. Also selectively erase some sections of the rake lines to the right of the “e” and “t”, to make it look like a wake.  Use shift and control as described above to erase in straight horizontal lines.
    3. Lower the Eraser opacity a bit, and reduce the intensity of the rake around the “p”, so it won’t interfere too much with the supernova
       
30. Here’s what we have so far:
    
31. Now for the cool plasma flame effects. Note,k the flames I’m demonstrating in these screenshots are not the ones I ended up with in the final logo.  Due to the nature of the Flame Render plugin, it’s pretty hard to get the same results twice.
    1. Make a new layer, filled with black, as a temporary background to the following steps.
    2. Make another new layer above that background, filled with black, in which to render the flame.
    3. Filters/Render/Nature/Flame.  Click Edit and Select Spherical from the Variation.  Click around the choices until one looks good.
    4. Then bump up the brightness a bit, and possibly zoom the camera a little. Set the Colormap to gris josette or calcoast09 to get some bluish tones.
       
    5. Now duplicate the layer above the first and set the mode to Addition, to brighten it up.
    6. Blur this second layer a bit with Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur set to about 7 pixels.
       
    7. Now duplicate that second layer again and blur it again, this time setting the blur radius to 15 or so, and reduce the layer opacity to about 60
    8. Now combine these layers using Layer/New from visible. Rename the new layer to “Flame”.  Then delete the 4 previous layers:
       
    9. Adjust the color input levels to reduce some of the outlying glow: bump up the black and mid points (left and middle slider) a bit, and maybe bring down the white point (the right slider)
       
    10. Now adjust the color balance of this combined layer to emphasize the blues, as we did previously with the lens flare:
        
    11. Now set this layer mode to Screen, and reduce opacity to about 90%.  Move this layer down beneath the supernova.
    12. Note in the following composite, I have produced two flames using this method, one over the “p” (with opacity 90%) and one faint one over the “t” (with opacity 18%).  I prepared these previously, using the same steps as above.  Due to the nature of the Flame Render plugin, it’s pretty hard to get the same results twice.
        
32. Ok, it’s finally time to bring back the “planet distorted” layer. Make it visible:
    
33. To add a bit more definition around the edges of the text:
    1. Select the original planet text layer and right click and choose “Alpha to selection”.
    2. Make a new layer, filled with transparency, above the “planet distorted” layer
    3. Set the foreground color to black
    4. Edit/Stroke Selection, and choose line width 2 pixels.
       
    5. Isolating that layer, it looks like this:
       
    6. Clear the selection.  To make the edges a bit rough, do Filters/Blur/Pixelize and set width and height to 6 pixels, and set the layer opacity to about 25%
       
    7. Now repeat these steps to make another layer above that one, stroked from the alpha selection of the original text, but this time use line width 3 pixels.  Set the layer opacity to about 25%
       
    8. Now duplicate that layer, and do Filters/Blur/Gaussian, with blur radius 4.  Set the layer opacity to about 45%
       
    9. Now move the “planet distorted” layer that we created back in the beginning just under this blurry one, and set its opacity to about 80%. There’s now a stack of 5 layers making up the word “planet” and its border:
34. Here it all is with the Rake layers turned back on, over the top of the text layers:
    
35. Finally, add a bit of “icing”- a very subtle little bubbly effervescence around the “p”.
    1. Create a new layer filled with black.  Set the foreground color to white.  Set the layer mode to Dodge.
    2. Select the Airbrush tool with the large Circle(19) brush, and scale it up even larger by about 3.6.  Turn on jitter at 2.75.  Reduce brush opacity to about 80%
       
    3. Airbrush little bubbles around the supernova area.  Here’s what it looks like with the layer opacity at 100%
       
    4. Reduce the layer opacity to about 25% to make it very subtle
       

The finished GIMP document has 20 active layers (and a bunch more inactive layers that are experiments or backup layers).   With all these layers, I’m able to leverage this work to make different background screens for videos, etc   I also used some tricks with the layers in the intro to the new video to generate some simple animation.  I may cover that in another blog post later.