My inspiration for this logo came from a ski sweatshirt I saw a couple years ago. I loved the look of two ski’s overlapping. Some may think it is a very simplistic and boring looking logo but I like how there is no clutter, it is very easy to understand and the simple lines and colors make it appear very structured instead of abstract and wild. I am a very organized person who does not like clutter so I felt like the logo is also a good representation of myself. A couple things that I did change from the design that I saw a couple years ago was the addition of poles, I felt like the skis alone was not enough for a logo. I also added an inner design of a thick white line to both skis. I did this by making a smaller rectangle then the ski and making it’s fill blank and it’s stroke white. Then I brought both of the fills to the front and made sure one ski was in front of the other so the two white fills would not cross and form a diamond.
I like the combination of blue and purple so I added a gradient going from blue to purple on the ski’s fill. I also really liked the shadow technique I learned on one of the tutorials so I gave the skis and poles a shadow with an opacity of 30 percent multiply to make it look more transparent and realistic. Then I felt like the logo needed a little more so I filled the background with a pinkish color with a gradient going from white to light pink with a radial type so the gradient would be in more of a circular form. I expanded the white on the background a little bit to highlight the skis and then added my initials in a aparajita font.
Overall I am happy with how my logo turned out but for the final I would like to play around with the background and maybe the skis and make them look a little more realistic. I could possibly do a more complex design within the skis instead of a white line or change the opacity levels so objects blend a little better.
Tori Van Duin 
I like your work a lot. Simple and straight to the point. I also love the fact that its about skiing. I snowboard and I know how awesome it is to tear up the mountain on a nice sunny day with fresh powder. That being said, I like your design and I only have a few comments to make. I feel that you could make everything bigger, and instead of having the TLVD on the side, you could put that on the skis or the ski poles. I think that would look pretty cool. Maybe add some layering to the skis itself to give it more of a depth feeling to it. This is an awesome design and I can see it become something totally awesome. You have a really good base and I feel you can improve that a lot by adding small details here and there. Maybe play around with the font shape and size?
Hey Tori,
I think your collage does a really nice job of clearly and effectively communicating your topic of skiing. From first glance I am able to recognize your topic because of the logo’s simplistic design. I also love the choice of color in the logo. The colors complement one another and give the logo visual unity. I like the use of the gradient for the skis, it helps give texture to the logo along with the spotlight of the background. The color scheme does a good job at bringing focus to the skis. I also really like the shadowing technique you used, it adds depth to your logo. A few suggestions however, would be to reduce the size of negative space. The balance, figure, and ground post on the course blog suggests to use the right balance of positive and negative space. If the collage were to be scaled to a very small size, the collage’s focus may become blurred between the pink background and the skis. I would maybe suggest making the skis more centered to eliminate some negative space. Also, just as you said in your own logo suggestions, I would possibly add more texture to the background using a gradient or another effect. Overall it looks really good and you can tell you worked really hard on it.
Looking at your logo, I clearly get the intended imagery, but I don’t know if I get the background. I feel like the background is a part of the logo as you present it here, instead of something designed to fall away when the logo would be transferred to letterhead, business cards, etc. Also, I understand the contextualizing the addition of the ski poles does, but they stand apart from the skis themselves so much that they feel extraneous. Maybe choose a palate that you can paint into the poles as well to tie it together?
I like your use of lines with the crossed skis and the vertical poles. The simple inner stripe on the skis themselves is nice and I don’t think you should throw it away without some thought on the scalability of the design you replace it with.
Your logo is a very good representation of your topic. There are a few things that i would do differently. I would first try to make the skis go from narrower to wider to give it a more realistic look. I also thought it would be kind of cool to incorporate snow into the logo, like a pile of snow where the initials are or something like that. I like the fact that the poles look realistic.
This is a very solid start for your logo draft. The idea of crossing two skies to really shows what you are passionate about. Also, there is a lot to be said for having a very simplistic logo.
That being said, I think there is some small stuff you can do to improve your current logo design. For example, you could make the back ground look/feel more like a mountain. It would take your logo over the top and make it sooo much cooler.
Other than that, there really isn’t much I can say about your logo. It is already pretty good.
From what my classmates had to say I think they agree a lot with the critiques I had for myself. One of the first things that I will change is eliminating the background space and possibly changing the color because it does not blend in very well with the skis.
One thing that I am confused about though is what to do with the skis. Some of the comments said to keep them, and that they thought they were cool while others did not think they tied in well with the overall design. I think I am going to keep them but one suggestion that I really liked was to incorporate some snow into my logo. I could put some snow coming down from above or have it around my initials to add a little more to the image.
Lastly I plan of adjusting the shading and background to make things look more realistic and not have the appearance of clip art like I feel like it looks now.