Project 2: The Bid

Operation Anchorage

The year is 2034. The Winter Olympics are a-roarin’. COVID is over, and the world has also survived the first Zombie apocalypse (Z-2023)

The olympics are on. After our tarnished world from COVID and zombies,

PART I: Initial Brainstorming — A Work in Progress (will be updated with more work

At the start of this project, I talked to an old friend of mine who lives in Anchorage—a local named Sutton Moore. She’s a native to Alaska, but specifically she lives in Anchorage.

Through my conversations with her, she expressed the importance of nature and aspects of rustic nature. I thought this inappropriate for unity as a world event (the biggest challenge of this) and instead voted to embrace cultural aspects.

Sutton gave me a lot of insight on some aspects to consider, but the strongest element that I wanted to incorporate was nature, above all else. With myriads of logos being incorporated throughout Anchorage’s history revolving around Ravens and Elk or Moose—hell, even weird combinations of the two (a total shutit)—I decided to look into the biggest phenomena that doesn’t have faunae of any sort: The Aurora.

I love Sea Green, so double bonus. Heck yes.

Part II: The Logo Drafts

I wanted to implement unity as a key word with nature. A unification of nature and the community—through auroras, organics, and slight heritage of the Athabascan, Yuupik, and Tlingit tribes (through my interaction with Sutton).

Part IIb: Digital Logo Representations

After talking to Lord-Professor Scott, I looked into exploring both organic and geometric styles. Given the rich, chilly history of our favorite northern US city (well, mine at least), I decided to push forward with several different concepts. The class spoke loudly for their profound dislike towards the bottom row due to it looking like Japanese, as well as less-successful experiments such as №3. Nobody really gave a shit about 7, but I saw mixed consensus on №4 and №1, above all else. Let’s change that to a more profound idea.

After class, I decided that direction truly wasn’t one I was happy with. It felt too… well, culturally inappropriate. It’s like shoving indigenous down your throat until you puke it out onto a logo.

that doesn’t sound too fun, now does it?

Part III: The Tribunal

A tough call. Aesthetic played EVERYTHING in this decision, so I needed to make sure it was futuristic, coherent, and experimental. Because of this, I decided on the middle: (Left) felt too much like something that you’d see for a mountain gear company (perhaps I can use this later on in my career or recycle this one); (right) felt too much like a similar aspect and was hitting a little too close for comfort to the OG Anchorage 1994 bid logo; The Center was unique, potentially limitless, aurora-like, and pushed the ideas of mixing art and design to make some wild shape that you’d see on a snowboarder. Next up, I need to think of Typography.

Part IVa: The Typography

Sadly weird to use this font due to the current issues going on between Russia and Ukraine, but Red October ended up being the start. I then stylized it and made it my own. Am I proud of it? Not necessarily, but I think it’s unique and fits the idea of what I have going on. It’s a hard call.

Part IVb: The Study of the Type

I am still looking at these slickers, but I think the second down on the right is the consensus of the class. I will delve into more variation here this weekend (3/2/2022)

Oh shit ignore that kerning on the top left. lol, ALAS KA

Part V: Delving into the different shapes

MY EYES AHHH (just kidding kinda)

Uploaded here is a little gist of the direction I’m going in. I wanted to use RGB colors in a similar way to how David Watkin did for the 2012 London ‘Lympix. Am I satisfied yet? Never. I’m a designer, dammit. Are we ever really satisfied? Are we ever really paid enough? Well, sometimes. Depends. This is the first draft of color, as I wanted to experiment with the blending technique that I will be using for secondary branding purposes.

Am I sold yet? Not quite. We’ll see. I need to look into it in a bit. My eyes hurt. lol

Part VI: Color Studies

Initially, when I was exploring color, I wanted to get representation for RGB, but I realized that it wouldn’t work as well as I’d like. Instead, I’ve resorted to getting as close as I possibly can and frankly… well, I can still use the deep colors for the secondary blend technique, but I think that as the logo stands for print, it would be more sensible to make it CMYK. Duh. But it’s the future. So maybe we invent a new form of ink that’s more accessible to everyone and.. and…. ah, screw it—this would be too hard to keep consistent. Imagine I’m using a paper stock that’s super bright though—that might be the way I can get this color to really jump. To compensate for that, I took the blacks that I pair this with down to the “holy 90%”—My favorite black for, like, everything.

Part VII: …But what about the Type?

Where did that let off at? Honestly it’s been tough. I’ve had to explore a lot of different approaches. I wasn’t sure where to go with it after my presentation, but I think that it all came together as well as I could with my feedback. There’s certain styles people were oodling at, but generally the consensus got funky because of the vastness of commentary on the ideas.

Everywhere, I went. I was like so stressed out because I couldn’t figure out the dang balance between type and form.

As we should know, and as this design depicts, the balance between the form and the type is so important in decisions like this. The logo with a strong, unique positive shape that works well with negative space requires a formula that pronounces and captures a charge of negative space.

Wow, I sounded like I learned something there.

Part VIII: …And the final!

I have chosen to make alternative marks for this, which I plan to further explain visually as this project develops. As-is, the challenge of all of this is the balance between the type and the

Bonus Bullshit

Well I went ahead and started looking at Hoodies and nonsense like that to see if I like the idea. So far, it’s got a good 90’s hit, which plays homage to that old 1994 bid that I just mentioned a couple of bittles ago. I did these with the original font, but I plan to expand this out with the new color choices, new arrangements, etc. I guess I just got excited! lol.

NOTE THESE ARE EARLY RENDITIONS BEFORE CONFIRMING COLORS AND TYPE.