Creative Futurist,

Welcome to Creative Assembly!

A new branch of The Creative Futurist newsletter designed to give you a peek behind my creative curtain.

I'll deconstruct how I made certain works by showing you the specific tools and techniques I used. I'll also discuss limitations, constraints, or obstacles I overcame as I was making it.

The goal is to provide you with more creative toys for your playkit, by showing you what's in mine.

I'll start with how I created the logo for Creative Assembly. If you've wanted to give your content a competitive edge online with visuals, this one is for you!

​

Creative Assembly Logo

​

what I made

​

logo for a new branch of my newsletter

​

tools I used to make it

​

• Namecheap + Canva

Namecheap is a website domain marketplace that also has a convenient logo maker app.

Select your preferred fonts, a few icons and colors, then it spits out a decent logo.

I made another quick logo with it recently.

​

​

But the icons can be pretty generic (it doesn’t have very many), so I went back to Canva to make something from scratch.

​

constraints in the making

​

Exhaustion - I had been sick most of the week. I had also been up late the night before attending a podcasting conference online (it was on US time, I live in Japan).

It was late afternoon by the time I started working on it so I was running on fumes.

how i overcame limitations

​

Used Mighty Fortitude! to push through.

This was part of the larger goal to update my newsletter landing page, so I really wanted to get it done.

what i did that was new

​

A good logo appears simplistic. Elegant. But contains layers of complexity. It’s nice when I land on one that contains a delicate balance of colors, contrast, and balance, but I strive for clarity and simplicity over award-winning.

This was a functional one.

The original concept for the logo was a toy box. The image of my brothers’ and my various action figures and Legos scattered on the floor in our room as kids (and my parents attempting to avoid spiking their feet on them) came to mind.

I started with simple geometric shapes, but that didn’t click.

Eventually, I experimented until I inserted a triangle matching the background into the white triangle, creating a fallen letter ‘A’.

That was cool, but SO common. So I decided to try something new and create my own letter ‘C’.

After some tweaking, I found if I placed a circle and overlayed a triangle then made both match the background, I could make it happen.

It was a success.

Below, I changed the background to black to show the trick.

Simple yet effective.

Perhaps one day, I’ll expand on my no-fail logo building framework. While my logos probably won’t win any awards, they do their job at providing visual support to my writing, podcasts, and music (very important on social media).

If you’re interested making easy eye-catching logos like this, send me a DM.

​https://twitter.com/kh_author​

​

Feedback

​

Let me know what you think about this format! This was fun.

Specifically I want to know:

• Do you like the informalness of it?
• What subheading was most interesting to you?
• What other information about what I made or my process would you like to see me include?

To respond DM me on Twitter​

​

or respond to this email!

Looking forward to your feedback!

-Keith