A lot of work went into the logo you see at the top of this page. It was the object of many thoughts, doodles, and sketches until I came up with something that I was proud of.

I’ve used the following symbol, which abstractly combines my initials (AR), for years.

Once I decided to make myself a blog, I knew this would be the logo people would know me by, but it needed something more. Maybe some kind of border. It doesn’t fit well in a box and a complete circle around it is just way too generic. I thought up a lot of designs and found myself using up my mental eraser quite a bit. After the concept development stage, I began working on the final piece.

1. Using pencil, I drew a circle to serve as the foundation. Those lines only act as reference points so I can know where the halfway marks on the circle are and things of that nature.

2. Now below, the inner circle defines the internal border, and the two lines in the middle will be the sides of the line that connects the A and R. Remember, all these lines are just the frames and only the used pieces will be outlined later.

3. I then drew the left part of the A and the curved part of the R. The last major portion is the straight line that runs through both letters. This completes each of the letters individually as well. All that was left was to close that line and the left part of the A, while keeping equal distance from those ends and the crescent.

4. Tracing time. I used my lucky pilot pen to outline what I want to actually show up and fill it all in. It’s times like these when I wish I had a fill bucket.

5. Erasing time. My logo foundations turned into eraser dust and left only the ink.

6. Then I turned it into the 3D model it is in my header using Adobe Illustrator. First I scanned it and pasted it into a new canvas.

7. Then with the magic of Adobe, and the click of a finger, my little drawing turned into a clean vector image. All you have to do is go to Object > Live Trace > Make and Expand.

It then becomes this:

8. Last but not least, I used the handy dandy extrude/bevel effect to transform it into what it is today.

A box appears so you can adjust the settings:

And it becomes this:

Thanks for reading.