Creating a Travel Blog - The Name and Logo!

As I mentioned on a previous posts, I'm going to be closing up shop in my current town then heading out for travel. Part of my plan is to start travel blogging while on the road to make a living (among other things).

I am going to document my process of developing a travel blog and then launching it, and then document the life of a travel blogger discovering the world.

Lets get inspired together and then travel together!

Lets Dive In - Picking a Name

Before I start on a webpage, I like to have a logo in mind.
To make a logo, I need to have a name or idea.

The process of brainstorming and name is a tricky one. You want something that stands out, something unique, but also speaks about the intent of the project.

I was debating strange travel words such as "Resfeber" or "Vagary", as they are unique but I don't feel as though they captured what I want. There a lot of other travel blogs with the word nomad, so I wanted to steer clear of that as well. For a moment I was playing around with the word platypus, like the lonely platypus, or platypus on wheels...lol but that was just a bit too hard to spell o.O .

After some more thinking on names I settled on the name, "Roaming Sparrow". Roaming is what I'll be doing, and the sparrow while small, has a big personality. It is a sign of good luck with travelers as well. It also had a nice ring to it, and then their is Jack Sparrow as well.. lol.

Drawing the Logo

With the name now selected I started to do some sketching in my book on sparrows. Here are some the drawings.

I enjoyed the look of that bottom sparrow and did some more drawings with it. To save time, I took out my light board and trace the bird a few times. Here are the tracings.

With some clean lines I can now bring it into Adobe Illustrator.

Onto Illustrator

For a logo I like to make sure its a Vector based image. Why Vector? Well, This will allow you MUCH more freedom in its use later on. With a vector based image you can scale to the size of the building and still have it be sharp!

To this end, with a few different versions sketched out, I imported them into illustrator and started going through some variations of them.

Here are the many variations I did in illustrator.

I won't go through the process of how to edit in illustrator, that might be beyond the scope of this post... But it's fairly intuitive when you dive in.

With a good version to use, I started to pay with layout and font choices.

Here are 2 other versions I used while working towards the final design.

I enjoyed the feeling of the last one. just not the font and a few more tweaks to the bird feathers, so I push to design more and arrived at what will be my final logo.

Overall I do like the way this logo looks.

I feel it's playful and has a nice energy to it. I am a bit worried that when I shrink it down and might get a bit muddy, and details will be lost... I do however feel it could still stand on its own and is iconic.

Conclusion

All said and done, from name brain storming to final logo took about 4 / 5 ish hours.

• What you think of this logo?
• Do you like it?

My next part of this process will be to set up a WordPress website and get content going.

Stay tuned for part two!