Quest for the perfect logo...Part One+Two.

Being a band is awesome for manymany reasons. I've worked in a few offices over the years where the "lad" element of the places have been more than certain that these perks involve nubile young virgins throwing themselves at me on a nightly basis, but for me the one consistent [as well as finding humour in the assumed Rock+Roll Lifestyle!] has been the design opportunities it can afford.

I've had some fun with this latest band, mainly because we could easily settle within many different camps aesthetic-wise - the spazzy nature of the music could land is in Wacky Neon Land, the death metal leanings putting us in The Land That Common Sense Forgot, and i quite like playing the anonymity angle with flyers in that as we're still a fairly young band, people seeing the name for the first time don't have a pre-conception as to what the logo should look like for the sake of genre.

But, alas, now we're getting more gigs and recording properly, i guess it's about time i grew some balls on the issue and took a stance on one design as something we could settle on.

After a bunch of crappy idea's, i kinda settled with the security-blanket of a Sans Serif, and just slightly editted a Franklin Gothic variant to give this eunuch of a logo :


It was mainly about the "es" at the end, obviously, and in retrospect i think it all should have a lot more of a dainty look, but meh, i'm done with that now..as i am with this dumb idea i roughly drew out in MS Paint :



Two things i've seen that've got me liking recently are lines and triangles, and after a few sketches decided to get it onto computer and this thing surfaced :


The "es" also unintentionally ended up as a sorta focus on this one due to their floating stature, which later facilitated the thought of clearing vagueness of the word with a complete rendering underneath.
Problems here were that, aside from pussying out with regards the original abstract "fuck 'em if they can't read it" sentiment, the spelling would point out the "e" as the only lower-case, as well as the letters looking too tall [disregarding that its a free-hand line-drawn thing, so all proportions are clearly off!].

Darren was into the idea, so busted out the ruler and knocked together this thoroughly more precise [and E-Problem-Ammended] version :


Now we're wondering if further elaborations on the thing will add to it, and if so where to stop! Our good friend Will popped into the office today, and suggested that once the first few letters of the thing are clear it'll give the brain a bit more to work with to decipher the rest, which led to this :

and then this :


I'm unsure if the "S" works, so tomorrow i'll try a few different versions and hopefully settle on one. One of the absolute Positives of this design is the ease with which it could be used as a stencil, and as Will pointed out earlier it also has a hint of the Alien/Aliens opening scene's to its form, which could lead onto some cool GIF action down the line..we'll see, all i know is that for today the logo rests, i'm off home!

THE FOLLOWING DAY....

Last night Revelation hit me - the "A" + "R" in the middle can be mirrored in the same way as the "e" + "s" in the earlier design, solving the "Ugly R" problem as well as balancing up the 2nd half of the word.
So, with this idea realised, it was the final furlong of resolving the "E" + "S"

Here's the basic idea at the start of Day Two, with the mirrored "A" + "R" :


The next issue is "E" - the original lower-case thorn-in-my-side.
Two idea's with this one, one that stuck and one that i was unsure about but Darren No'd..



..and now the "S"..

..meh..

Darren hadn't been happy with the flick of the "N", and so i gave him the rest of his body. This gave us the unexpected "middle bar" [created by the bodies of the "N" + "T"] and so then had to stay, even though i'm still unsure if it looks better without.."S" also given this cheeky extra which seemed to sort it out [as well as giving it a similar inversed end-of-word angle to the start of the word, if that makes sense!] :


I think this is The One so far, and until i can show the others in the band incase they think owt can be changed, but just because we'd not tried it thus far Darren suggested completing the middle-bar's to the "A"s + "R" :


The next stage will be doing it again a Lot more precisely and on a lot larger scale..and That has been the over-analytical approach to an antares logo design!

[UPDATE]
Haha, had an idea for a silly shirt design + quickly knocked it together so thought i'd put it here.

PS. doubt we'll be able to afford gettin shirts done for a while, proper expensive!
-steve