I was assigned with designing a logo for the Integrated Design & Media department at NYU Tandon School of Engineering as a part my Visual Foundation Studio coursework.
As an Integrated Design & Media major, I realized that even though our major/department is looking towards the future by learning, creating, and enhancing a lot of advanced technology, media, and design projects such as website development, virtual reality/augmented reality, user experience/user interface, product design, and more. However, we still learn about the past such as art history and art movement to build a foundation for our creative knowledge. Not only does learning about these help us understand how art concepts and artists progress throughout the centuries, but they also help us “steal.” I’m sure we have all encountered famous quotes such as “Steal Like an Artist” and “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal.” In these contexts, the quotes don’t mean art thefts we see all over social media, but more so borrowing creative elements, combining them, and creating something new, something “original.”
With that idea in mind, I wanted something a logo that looks both futuristic and vintage looking at the same time to show both the creating-advanced-technological-project side and the taking-inspiration-from-the-past side of IDM. So I went with a color palette that represent cyberpunk and outerspace/cosmic aesthetic such as hot pink, dark purple, and cyan. Then for the logo style itself, I wanted to combine the most basic knowledge of typography: font styles, which are serif, san-serif, script, and decorative.
This was my original draft of the logo. The feedback I got from my classmates was to add futuristic colors to juxtapose the retro appearance of the logo to implement my idea of combining both the past and the future together.
