Hello everybody and welcome back to my blog! This week I was assigned to make a logo. In 2019, I have decided to make my school work and my passions overlap. You could call it being lazy and double dipping on all my work, but let’s go with the first thought.

I work as a Peer Tutor at the Digital Knowledge Center, my school’s digital skills tutoring center. Part of my work as a Peer Tutor is helping organize a campus-wide peer tutoring conference. As a volunteer for organizing the conference, I get to help choose a theme. Last year, the theme was Collobor18, which focused on collaboration and bringing all the tutors together. This year, I wanted to make the theme a simple word that could guide the conference into some interesting territory. I brainstormed for a while and came up with the following words: apex, erudition, and dialectic. Instead of making three variations of one graphic, I decided to make three different graphics based off of three separate themes. After coming up with these words, I designed the following graphics on Illustrator.

Apex

Apex means “the top or highest part of something, especially one forming a point.” I chose this word because tutors on campus are usually some of the most involved students on campus, meaning that they are at the top or are elite. Most people think of mountains when they think of the word apex. Personally, I think mountains are an overdone graphic symbol. Therefore, I went with a pyramid to embrace the more mathematical sense of the word. As this conference is a part of UMW, it has to follow UMW’s firm branding standards. Thus, all the colors and fonts in my designs follow the UMW branding standards.  

Erudition

Erudition means “the quality of having or showing great knowledge or learning; scholarship.” Once again, I chose this word because it reflects my audience (tutors) and characteristics that they strive to have. For this design, I wanted to represent scholarship and higher education. A symbol that most people at UMW recognize and associate with learning is the bell tower. I wanted to incorporate the tutors into the design, so I decided to make a human shape the “windows” of the bell tower.

Dialectic

Dialectic is “the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions.” In my job as a Peer Tutor, I am constantly investigating and problem-solving. So for me, this theme is perfect for a conference as it promotes questioning topics and analyzing the validity of ideas. Moreover, every tutoring session involves two people sharing information and an environment of learning. For this graphic, I wanted to show two side profiles merging together like a Venn diagram. Additionally, the word “dialectic” reminds a lot of people of “dialogue” or the act of speaking. Hence, I wanted to make the word appear broken up like someone is sounding it out for the first time. I did this by adding dots in the proper grammatical place.

Creating graphics for me has always been hard as it requires a decent amount of creative energy. This assignment taught me to push through the frustration and think about simple symbols that people can relate to. I found it fairly easy to create these simple clean, line graphics. However, I do wish that I could make the bell tower symbol more clear, but it was tremendously hard to find a bell tower that looks like UMW’s and is clear enough to use. I really did enjoy creating these graphics, and they have assisted me in choosing which theme suggestions I like the most.