Fonts + Logo

When choosing some font's for my website I decided that I needed a mixture of Mario-based fonts and modern fonts. I went onto the popular font website www.dafont.com and then looked for some fonts which were either Mario-based, modern and stylish or more traditional.

I came up with the following shortlist which is analysed in my sketchbook:

Fonts chosen - Also in sketchbook.

Now that I had a short-list of fonts, I needed to pick a main font and a secondary font so I could mock up the logo and see how the fonts would work in a logo design.

I decided that in order to reflect the Mario world as well as a modern website I would create a logo with 'Mario' in the video game font and with 'Plumbing' in a stylish, new font. I touched on this when coming up with logo designs in my sketchbook.

Here is the outcome of these designs, click on the image for the full size picture:

The short-listed fonts combined into logo forrnat.

After looking at the fonts in this logo-based format I have chosen the fonts 'Super Mario Bros.' and 'Antipasto.' which are both freely available at www.dafont.com.

Now that I have chosen the fonts in which my logo will contain, I could mock up some different coloured versions of the logo - as this is where the colour scheme for my website will originate from. Here are the mocked up logos in different colours. The reason why the chosen colours are so bright is because they are derived from the official Mario logo - something that is replicated in the 6th logo below.

(Click to enlarge)

After seeing these 'same colour' logos I mixed and matched some of these colours to create some different looking images, and these are shown below:

(Click to enlarge)

Now that I have played around with different colour combinations I can create a final logo piece. Whilst this logo design does not yet incorporate any of my other logo ideas in my sketchbook (such as a plumbing/Mario related emblem) it is still possible for me to add this, though I may yet decide that this logo does not need anything else, and my header will then just be left simple - albeit with other images possibly used within the header instead of within the logo element.

Here is my chosen design:

I chose the colourful Mario lettering combined with black as I think it incorporates the Mario games with a modern and stylish feel too. When looking at the original designs though, I realised the letters were fairly spread out and so I adjusted the font kerning in Photoshop so that the letters were more bunched together. I also thought hard about the visibility of the chosen colours and then decided to add a drop shadow in order to make these visible and readable on a website background.

I think this logo works very well and will look good within my website's header.

Update:


I also tried putting a 'Starman' from the Mario games into my logo, in a similar way to a design in my sketchbook:

Logo with added starman.

However, I decided that this does not look as good as before and so am sticking to my original logo design.