For my logo, I struggled in the beginning with coming up with a brand personality to create a logo for. I recently have been playing a game called God of War which is based upon Norse mythology. I decided to since we were doing a publications brand to complete a logo that was representative of knowledge and wisdom. This is why I chose Mimir. Within my brand guide I describe who Mimir is and what the tree and the rune within the tree represents. I really enjoyed this project because it was extremely difficult and time consuming to trace an image of the Yggdrasil and the root patterns. I really wanted to include some form of color into the logo but it didn’t look right and the versatility of the logo makes more sense to keep it either black or white. I used a pen & tablet to draw this logo and it was really good practice for me to learn.
In the early form of my design I wanted to depict Mimir’s face directly. The issue that came with this was scalability. I knew that if i was to reduce the image down it would make the face unrecognizable and wouldn’t be a universal image for people to recognize if it was to be a larger brand. I researched more into norse mythology and decided to go with the Yggdrasil as my motif because of the story of Mimir and protecting the well of wisdom at the base of the Yggdrasil.
I wanted to incorporate the Nordic language in some form or another so I decided to embed the rune for intellectual learning and communication. This rune made sense for a publishing company due to the fact that Mimir is the God of Wisdom so the Ansuz rune correlates with his power directly.
For font I wanted to do something representative of the Nordic Futhark but it did not make sense to have a complex and edgy font with such a complex logo. The logo became bogged down when I played around with fonts that were similar to Nordic runes in style. I chose a bold thick sans serif font due to its ability to stand out amongst the complicated logo.
I think this logo design was a perfect challenge for me because I am proficient in photoshop but I forced myself to utilize Illustrator for the entirety of the logo process as well as 99% of the brand guide. This was extremely helpful to me as a designer because I know being proficient in all creative cloud programs will help me with my job search within the future.