Urban Apple Realty

Here's another logo I created. This was actually a collaborative effort, but the finished image, I feel, is very successful. This was actually for a competition and my design won, so I thought I would talk about it for a bit here. The goal was to create a logo for a realty company here in Chicago called "Urban Apple Realty." Right away I had an idea of what I wanted to do so I didn't waste any time in putting it together.

I knew I wanted to take an apple and actually carve it. One of the first things I learned when I started college, from Mr. Ryan Swanson, was that Photoshop is great but if you can take a photo of whatever you're trying to create, do it. Sure, I could have created an image like I had in mind, but these days I'm more about creating it organically instead of digitally. When I first learned Photoshop I was all about making these weird designs but I've kinda moved past that now and back to an actual hands-on approach whenever possible.

For this idea, I bought the largest apple I could find and carved it up. I left the bottom 1/3 alone and carved the top 2/3 into a building, leaving the stem on top of the apple so that it was still recognizable as an apple. I then took a photo of the apple in my photo tent, imported it into Photoshop for some level adjustments, opened it in Illustrator to live trace it to create a vector image of it and then brought back in Photoshop for some manipulated text. The resulting image was submitted to Dave Rodriquez for judging.

My concept was very much liked, but my type treatment left much to be desired (which I wasn't surprised about because I wasn't a fan of that part of the design myself). However, one of the other entries (from Matt Hecht) had a text layout that was really slick and she liked his type with my concept so the two were combined. Finally, the image I submitted was a vector, but wasn't quite an image that could be used for a logo so Dave took the concept and made an improved vector image of it. The finished result can be seen below.

As you can see, it's a very effective and successful collaborative effort and resulted in a portfolio piece for all three of us to use, noting credit to each of the people involved. I'm very pleased with the logo and am really happy to add this to my portfolio because it's the first "corporate" logo I've created that's going to be used. Nice!

...up next... my website re-design for Element Bars.