Year: 2019 & 2020
Tools: Adobe Illustrator
Photo credit: European Southern Observatory
A group of young researchers organising AbGradCon (Astrobiology Graduate Conference) 2020 asked me to create a flyer and a logo for the event.
They wanted an image associated with Japan and another that would give viewers an idea of what the conference was about. In the beginning, they did not want to go with images that were too stereotypical, so I added ones not often used as representations of Japan.
The team were concerned that there could be issues with images of temples being used in the poster, so opted for Mt. Fuji instead. I also tried changing the colours.
They decided the second photo of Mt. Fuji was less stereotypical and more attractive than the first. I also removed the top and bottom triangles.
All that was left was to add the ELSI logo.
As for the AbGradCon 2020 logo, the team requested I include Mt. Fuji (the location of the event is often incorporated into the logo), the year and an allusion to astrobiology. So I started with simple illustrations of Mt. Fuji, plus a ringed planet with a moon and a cell within "2020".
They liked the round logo the most, but one of the team members had drawn a very beautiful and detailed image of Mt. Fuji with the sun behind it, hydrothermal vents in the foreground and cursive font. Generally, cursive fonts do not work well with a logo that must also look good small, so despite sticking as closely as I could to her drawing in the first logo, I moved towards a more basic and less busy design on the right.
The team agreed on the last design, but wanted to see how it looked if I played around with the positioning of the text and its length.
This was the final design below.
Then covid-19 happened, AbGradCon was postponed until 2021 and I did a redesign of the logo. The last zero had to become a one and look a bit like a microbe.
They asked me to remove the serif at the top of the one and to make it look more like E. coli.
I felt it looked too much like a centipede and they agreed, so I changed it.
Lastly, they asked for shortened flagella and this was the final result:
