Logo design – wildlife holidays

The logo

The brief

A logo for a company that leads wildlife holidays in different parts of South America. ‘Selva’ means ‘jungle’ or ‘wilderness’ in Portuguese.¹

It needed to look contemporary and confident while still being friendly and natural.²

False start

Before I started I thought that the ‘v’ could be a leaf and the ‘a’, if written in uppercase, could be another leaf…

It’s not a bad idea but I like a logo to have a strong enough to shape to work in black.³

As well as making the logo more recognisable it also makes it more flexible. Sometimes you might need to change the colour of your logo for different uses, to contrast with a background for example. Or you might need to print something that can only be done with a single colour e.g. pad printing on merchandise such as pens.

I don’t think this works in black…

It could be refined but it’s always going to be a heavy indistinct splodge.

The shape of the word

I rejected that idea then and went back to the drawing board.

Looking at the shape of the word it’s pretty clear, given the subject, that the ‘l’ is asking to become a tree. It so wants to be a tree that resistance is futile.

The next question is ‘how does it want to be a tree?’.

Not like this…

It’s okay, does most of the job, but it’s too perfunctory. If making the the ‘l’ into a tree was the an obvious idea, then this is the obvious way of doing it. Which means too many obviouses.

This seemed like a good opportunity to try something a bit different and attempt some cursive lettering, incorporating the tree shape into the ornamentation.

Out with the pens to work out how to do it. And then on to the computer to draw it tidily because my writing is a mess.

It took a while. When designing ‘type’ style lettering you can often build it from basic geometric shapes and reuse parts of some letters to make parts of other letters. Computers are good at both these things. This makes it a little easier and quicker.

Designing ‘script’ style lettering is a much more manual process. It’s tricky getting curves right and balancing the shapes of letters. Also there’s a tension between keeping a more handwritten look and the ‘perfection’ that’s possible with graphics software. Too much of the latter is boring but you don’t want the letters to look untidy or odd either. I’m not sure I’ve got it right but you’ve got to stop somewhere.

See more of my logo designs here.

1. In Spanish it’s the more specific ‘jungle’ or ‘forest’.
2. I was tempted to put all those adjectives in quotation marks. It’s all very vague this design stuff.
3. Unless it doesn’t but this should be a deliberate decision.