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Here is a logotype I have come up with for my wife’s public relations business. She caters towards fashion clients, but also works with other industries. She wanted to avoid the look a lot of fashion pr firms have (a lot of Bodoni/Didot, or Futura, or on the other end, distressed fonts for edgier clients). She likes clean lines, likes Art Deco, wanted something gender neutral—not too girly. No sharp lines, as she read in a Feng Shui book that those are bad.

The name is “son public relations.” SON stands for “Something Out of Nothing” because our last name is Nix, which in Dutch (along with a few other languages, but my family is from Holland, so it’s Dutch in this case) means “nothing.” So her clients are literally getting something out of nothing.

By the way, I already pointed out to her that Something Out Of Nothing should be SOON, not SON. But she liked SON. Since I want to remain happily married, I let it go.

After a couple of tries, we settled on Estilo Script. Clean, Deco-inspired, curvy without being too feminine, and no sharp lines—rounded terminals even!

This is a rough sketch with Illustrator optical kerning and me Frankensteining a swash from a capital N onto the lowercase n.

Any comments? She expressly did not want a logo, just a logotype. Also, any suggestions for a companion serif face? I was thinking a modern, but didn’t want something with so much contrast.

UPDATE 10-18-2006

Here are some further concepts taking into account some of your concepts. I have layed them out on a 3.5x2 business card format to get a better perspective. I’m still not feeling the swash, and as much as I feel like I’m copping out of designing the logo, I like the way it looks “straight out of the box” on the bottom 2 samples.

unknown

Nice unique font I think it could work well,

For what it’s worth, I think the text set all in a line like that is too much, with the diff. weights + frankenswash… it reads as a bit of a jumble.

I think ‘son’ could cope really well on its own set in an olympic size swimming pool amount of white space (a small lonely word set like that might work with the somethiing from nothing theme) with a much smaller ‘public relations’ on the next line taking up a similar amount of horiz. space.

Don’t love the swash but I like the idea of introducing a bit of personality to the letterforms, perhaps a bit of irregularity/humanity could be nice.

i know nothing about nothing, but could public relations possibly be shortened to ‘pr’ and sprinkled somewhere around the dominant son? (sounds freudian).

for what it’s worth,

—N

unknown

I agree, although my emphasis would be on how to make that “public relations” text reads better.

Maybe set ‘pr’ in all caps, firstly because it’s an abbreviation, and secondly because that would contrast with the lowercase logotype.

LOVE the white space idea.

unknown

I really would like to see the whole image in a bit smaller size and more freespace around the wordmark.

Also, it would be worth to play with the proportions between the SON and the public relations copy.

Peter

www.zwoelf.hu

unknown

I think the swash is just a bit too much. Try cutting off the bottom of the ‘s’ and flipping it horizontally to create a smaller swash. I agree that “public relations” needs to be changed/removed so that “son” is more dominant.

- Lex

unknown

I think the o in son needs to move to the right slightly, in the context of the other two letters I think the curve of the n at the top right comes too far down, I also think you can use a less vertical swash, angled from top left to bottom right, mirroring some of the s. The kerning in public relations is not helped by Illustrator, you could also try (if you don’t want to go down the pr route) upping the weight a touch.
Tim

unknown

I have updated my original post above with further concepts.

unknown

I think that #3 is the winner; it gets the point across while simplifying the concept. Using a single line with a black/grey break also imparts a degree of elegance the the other versions lack.

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