Against the Odds: Round 2

This round of sketches were much more successful. The client really wanted to focus on two key ideas/thought:

•Truth, coming out of darkness.
•The messy work of emotions

I personally, really wanted to spend some time reflecting on what being "against the odds" means and how to represent that graphically.  One of the critiques I received from the client on the first round of sketches was that it was too clean to represent what she dealt with in the counseling of people with serious problems.  She also wanted the logo to not necessarily scream "hey you, I'm a logo for a mentoring/counseling service!!"

So first I considered what worked in the first couple of sketches, which wasn't much, lol.  The client really liked the "rough" texture that was made made be my diagonal pencil shading.  So I brought that over in the top concept.  In the top concept, I tried to elude to the fact that a lot of people might look well put together on the outside but on the inside, they are a mess.  Sometimes, the messy things they are trying to keep bundled up in there becomes to much to contain and breaks through to the surface.  I wanted this concept to almost purely be based on text design.  To symbolize what I was trying to do, I chose a serif font that I slightly altered.  I connected the serif on the "g" and the "a" to signify the partnership the client forms with her patients.  I used the same pencil shading texture in this design as I used in the first round of sketches.  The overall design relates the idea of internal emotional conflict and how it can affect our outward dealings.

The next concept with the arrows is where I kicked it up a bit.  For this concept, I really wanted to explore want being against the odds would look like.  I tried to break it down to the simple idea of being out numbered.  Out numbered by what? Something physical? Something emotional? Maybe a combination?  It doesn't really matter what it is, it's only matters that you feel like you can't overcome your current circumstance.  I started playing around with different variations of arrows and how they could interact with each other and BOOM!! It hit me.  A symbol that not only utilizes positive and negative space nicely but also works as a metaphor for "Truth, coming out of darkness." 

I continued to mess around with the direction of the arrows along with positive and negative space which can be seen in the bottom design that has the "A" in the arrows going up and down.  I wasn't as crazy about this design as the design with the arrows going horizontally but I included it anyway.  

Up next, Round 3.