Balaam’s Donkey is a Denver-based classic rock band, and they commissioned us to produce a logo for their band.  The logo imagery was to be, not surprisingly, a donkey.  In keeping with the light-hearted, cheeky personality of the band, we decided to create a logo with a bright, cartoon-like feel to it.  We started out by making several pencil sketches of the donkey until we had a sketch that we were satisfied with.

Our finalized donkey sketch

After we had a finalized sketch, we scanned it into the computer and traced it out in Adobe Illustrator.  First we drew it out as a series of fixed-stroke-width lines.  Then we converted the stroked lines to solid shapes so that we could refine the line thickness.  That way we could transform the chunky, single-thickness line drawing into something a bit more elegant, as you can see in the below example for the lines of the donkey ears:

The donkey ears before and after we manually adjusted the line thickness

We worked on the Illustrator drawing like this until we produced the final black and white version of the logo, seen below.

The finished logo in black and white

After that we started adding in color and shading…

Added the background…

And finally added a subtle drop shadow between the donkey and the background to give the illustration some dimension.

After this was finished, it was time to choose an appropriate typeface to match the illustration.  In logo work, when the lettering is such a prominent part of the visual design — and indeed sometimes the only component of the visual design — finding an appropriate typeface is of utmost importance.  We needed a typeface that was both solid and easy to read, but still with a bit of a whimsical flavor to it.  It took a lot of experimentation to find an appropriate typeface, and we looked at many different typefaces side by side.

Some of typeface finalists that we considered

Finally, after choosing an appropriate typeface, we had our finalized logo.

Balaam’s Donkey was very pleased with their new logo and will be using it on all their official band materials from here on out.  We enjoyed working with them and wish them the best of success in their musical endeavors.  Whenever Balaam’s Donkey needs additional graphic design and web design work in the future, we at Chris Strom, LLC will be happy to work with them again.