About Designing Springfield

I'm a graphic designer - illustrator - cartoonist with a fondness for typography and a liking of the Simpsons. It seems only natural to put them together and have a little fun with the world of Springfield. It might also lead to paying work....
Showing posts with label toys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toys. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Malibu Stacy

I had some down-time today while waiting for files to transfer, so I went ahead and did another Springfield logo treatment. This time it's Lisa's favorite fashion doll, Malibu Stacy.

As always, I started by looking at the real-world inspiration, in this case the marketing monster known as Barbie. Of course I had a vague idea of what the logo ought to look like, but I was surprised to see how often the good folks at Mattel refresh their brand identity. There are a lot of variations on the basic pink script logo. Sometimes it's been swirly and girly, other times it looks like hand-drawn lettering, and still other times it's a rounded-serif italic. The only thing that remains consistent is the garish trademark pink color.

With that in mind, I decided that "Malibu" should contrast with "Stacy" in every possible way; it's geometric and angular, all caps, widely-spaced, smaller, and bright blue. (The blue is intended to remind one of the ocean, as in Malibu Beach.) The font is ITC Serif Gothic, a popular font from the '70s that remains interesting and not too dated.

For "Stacy" I started with one of the marvelous sign-making fonts from A&S, in this case A&S Signwriter, which I then converted to outlines, threw a stroke on and tortured within an inch of its life, fattening the letters, fattening them even more at the bottom, extending the crossbar on the t and elongating the tail on the y. Then I tipped the whole thing (except the crossbar on the t) to a slight angle and laid "Malibu" over it with a white stroke placed behind it. I chose a lavender color for the logo since pink is claimed by the competition.