Blood Bath & Beyond

I looked on Google's image search for Homer's favorite gun shop, but couldn't find any indication of a logo for it, which means I'm again left to my own devices rather than reworking an existing one. So of course the place to start is with the store that's being parodied here, Bed, Bath & Beyond.

The BB&B logo is pretty distinctive, so I decided I'd try to emulate it a little but not too much. I kept the stacked light and bold sans serif type and that's about it. Their logo is set in all caps, using Futura Light and Extra Bold, and they do an interesting distortion on the word "Beyond", so that each letter is horizontally distorted a little more than the previous one, giving the idea that it's stretching off into the beyond. Clever, but I chose to leave it alone.

My version is in Gill Sans, another geometric font that's a bit evocative of the Bauhaus School, heavily kerned, and set in upper- and lower-case. Bed, Bath & Beyond's corporate color is a soft blue, but for a gun store we need to be a little bolder; naturally blood red is the obvious choice, but it needs some contrast to set it off, so the "Beyond" gets to be black.

The biggest challenge with this logo was deciding whether "Blood Bath" should be one word or two. I ended up cheating a bit, making it two words but trimming down the space between words to about 1/3 of what it wanted to be.