Designing for Fun

Work in progress of the Ludlow Theatre logo

This is just for fun

I'm in the midst of designing the website for the Ludlow Theatre in Ludlow, KY for Circus Mojo. They have a person already working on the logo, but while waiting for him to finish it I went ahead and started designing one myself. It's an old theatre that they are renovating, and it's really cool. I did a show there back on September 14. Lots of fun!

Paul (the owner) and myself liked the idea of incorporating a theater marquee in the logo. The theater is on a main street in Ludlow, so many people will see the marque as they drive by. By making the logo match what the residents see will help to connect the two images.

I looked at lots of photos of marquees, until I found one at just the right angle. I wanted to logo to really give the impression that you were standing right there outside the theatre looking up at the marquee, or driving by.

The photo was kind of small, but it didn't matter since all I needed was the outline to trace in a vector program. I was having trouble getting the text into the correct orientation to make it look like the letters were mounted on top of the marquee, so I start up my 3D modeling program and built the marquee, added the text, the took a screen shot. My 3D program is Second Life. Not the most high-level fancy system, but for what I need it works fine and I am pretty good at building things in there. By the way, if you're ever logged into SL, send me an IM (Mr Greggan) and I'll send you a collection of stuff I've built there, all full-perm freebies. If that makes no sense to you, don't worry about it.

I then started over with tracing into a vector file, which worked much better this time. I use Intaglio, which is again not a high-level vector app like Illustrator, but it does what I need.

Once I had the tracing done, I opened up the file in Photoshop Elements. I'm not willing to pay over $700 for the fully loaded Photoshop since I wouldn't use 80% of it's functions anyway. I barely use what's available in Elements, a watered down lite version of Photoshop.

Once in Elements, I added the text and used the underlying 3D image from Second Life to distort it into the correct angle and orientation. It worked great!

Next some fiddling around with gradients and drop shadows. I like this a lot!

By the way, if anybody knows where to legally get the latest Adobe Suite Mac for a really good price, please let me know. My wife works with the Gwinnett County School System, so she may be able to help with an educational discount. Please contact me with any ideas.