House Adducci: Logo Evolution

The Initial Concept

Nick and I have talked since we started dating about a house shield or some other defining image for our family. He’s made multiple passes at a family crest and they were all great! But for House Adducci, we needed something simple, clean, and iconic. Our conversations usually start with some kind of animal since that kind of imagery is commonly at the heart of a family crest. But we can never decide on something that represents us as a whole family. (I’m Mama Bear and he prefers the Stag). We’re huge fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender so we somehow wandered into elemental territory (I’m earth/fire and he’s earth/air, in case anyone was wondering). Celebration and light have been on our minds this year and have come to define House Adducci so naturally we gravitated to fire. The naked flame of House Adducci fights the darkness and stands for truth, wisdom, joy, and passion — everything we’d like to instill in our art and stories.

The Shield

The shield has always made its way into our family imagery. The more romantic notions of medieval times are something Nick and I have in common and we’ve made great use of them over the years. He started with interesting up-ticked corners and a softer lower point to accommodate the flame design. And I hadn’t told him we weren’t incorporating “House Adducci” into the shield so this quick version has the text included.

Busting Out

Nick experimented with having the light rays burst from the shield, overlapping the borders and creating a pretty dramatic image with depth. Unfortunately, I had to immediately ask for a change. Since this would be our logo, I wanted something with more definitive edges and a particular silhouette. Obviously, he also drastically upgraded the flame into a sort of clean, modern interpretation of a flame. I did not like that at first. The circle in the design especially caught my eye and I couldn’t tear myself away from it. We had a long talk about this design to decide where we would both be okay going. A more minor note was a change to the top of the shield, creating an inward indention instead of outward. Nick had initially mentioned an arrowhead look and as an archer I liked that. So I insisted we bring that in.

Contained but Confused

I really liked this iteration, though the circle in the flame design still bothered me a lot. I wasn’t so sure about the variation in the shield outline as influenced by the light rays either but it wasn’t that big of a sticking point. As I discussed the flame with Nick, he said was sort of going for a fireball, or at least some kind of fire with movement. He’s incredibly sensitive to the movement or lack thereof in illustration work. Once I realized where he was coming from, I realized the fire felt… confused. He wanted movement to indicate action but in doing so, I wasn’t getting a solid impression of either a flame or a fireball. Somewhere in the conversation we stumbled into talking about the golden spiral. It can be intregal to design and how it “feels” to the user. So I asked him to go for a more golden spiral proportion with the rendering and perhaps work on the over all balance of the thing.

BOLD

Nick rotated the flame and really tried to accommodate everything we talked about. I liked it. But when I applied it to our website, the whole thing was just too BOLD. It was overwhelmingly white and just wasn’t striking the right tone. I think I asked Nick to once again move that darned circle, that he hadn’t quite gotten the golden spiral proportions right and perhaps we could back off on some of the outlines. As an interesting little add-on, we looked at the original rendering and realized it might be nice to try the rays coming from the top of the flame.

And now for something completely different…

I really didn’t like this version when I first got it. I’d gotten used to the previous versions and this one was so different, I initially had a lot of criticism for it. But when Nick and I sat down with it and I babbled my way through proposed fixes, I finally realized that one of my own shortcomings was changing the way I saw the image. Literally. I have trouble with negative space. If the difference between positive and negative are too subtle (by my estimation), I have a tendency to see the wrong part of the image. The negative. Nick was trying to imply the light rays and all I was seeing was action lines. We walked away encouraged that perhaps a slight tweak to the thickness of some of the lines would do the work and really transform the image. I also just wanted everything sort of cleaned up and thickened a little better, bolder balance. (Finding balance is hard.)

Welcome to House Adducci

And there it is! Our final logo hits on all cylinders and hopefully conveys exactly what we’re looking to convey. Light. Passion. Courage. Truth. Hope. And honor. All in a balanced, well designed and executed logo. This little gem will not only serve as the logo for our media production endeavors, but our own “house” logo for the Adducci family. Like I said at the beginning, we have a more involved Adducci Crest, but this is simplified image we can hearken back to in a moment to remind us who we are and why we do what we do. The strength of any great icon.

Bonus: The Icon

When it came to using our logo on the web, there are various uses that don’t play nice with the finer points of our image. We simplified the image even more and splashed some color on it so that it would come across in that teeny, tiny image in your address bar and catch your eye in the array of icons on your “favorites” screen.