A Strange History
I redid the logo for my company, Strange Unlimited LLC, complete with an animated entrance, built with Blender, Adobe After Effects, and (most importantly) love:
What’s that you say? You didn’t even know that I had a company, much less a logo, much-much less an animation for it, in the first place? For shame!
Okay, while it pains me to admit it, it’s not a surprising reaction, as I have not been cranking out content that would be able to utilize said logo as much as I have in the past. And even then said content was normally videos for other clients and internal uses for another company I worked for, so plastering my own company logo at the front was not really much of an option:
“So, Matt, you got that focus group footage edited for us to watch?”
“Oh, you bet! Check this out!”
“Uh huh… what the hell is this logo animation at the front?”
“Looks cool, right?”
That said, this had me thinking about how long I have been working with the logo: stretching back to the last millennium, sweet children! It started in CCAD and since then I have always been tinkering with my “company” logo.
I say “company” complete with the quotes because back in the day whenever I made something with video or animation that I would show or upload to the ‘net, I almost always added the logo, despite the fact that I did not, in fact, have an incorporated company. But hey, when you are in college and have not yet had your hopes and dreams crushed beneath the mud-encrusted boot of reality, why not indulge in some light-hearted fun?
At first the logo was actually merely a still I snatched from Adobe Premiere and its marvelous effects:
Back then it was “Strange Productions,” mainly because I was tickled pink at the thought of releasing films with the blurb/pun “A Strange Film” at the front. Simple minds, simple pleasures, I know.
As nifty as that logo was, one of the big issues I had as a humble, Midwestern student is that I did not have, at the time, the fonts that I could bring between computers. Bringing the source files between computers just was not an option, and for some reason, everytime I moved from one computer to another, I lost the “cool” fonts that I had wanted to use, meaning that I had to recreate a logo with what I had at the time. This led to some, well, less-than-stellar attempts:
At the time, I was not thinking of it as something that could be printed or viewed as a small image on the web, but rather how well I could animate it. The logo above I used Adobe After Effects to craft, and while that made it easy to animate, it also made it nearly impossible to use in a printed format.
This led me to a complete redesign years later, when I was setting up an online portfolio. This time, I actually built it out in Illustrator and Photoshop – programs that were much better at settling myself up to be able to use the logo across multiple formats. Animation, websites, and the occasional flier left around random campuses in a vain attempt at viral marketing.
At least the design is something that will look very familiar:
For me, the backwards S was the clincher – people seeing the word would be able to read it fine, but would have a slight pause about the S. Just the kind of feeling I wanted to generate: “Oh, that’s cool… wait, is that ‘S’ backwards? That’s ….strange–Oh, I get it!”
I like to daydream that, at some point in the voluminous past, someone actually said this out loud.
The latest revision was done as I really wanted to build it out into a 3D model, and include the LLC aspect this time. After I built it, I was able to add some lighting and SFX to complete the animation.
Fittingly, I don’t have a version that I can use for print, but in this case, I just need to update the Illustrator file with the new layout, so, that’s okay? I think?
With the animation finished, now all I need to do is create a video, so I can attach this to the front; a daunting task, but to paraphrase Psalm 23:4: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of big projects, I will fear no evil; for I have a spiffy new 3D logo animation that is totally wicked sick.”