Author J. Dharma Windham’s New Logo
The author behind the pipe and beret finally has a logo worthy of his stately yet mischievous persona and the fantastic historical fiction he’s becoming known for. He and his wife are both talented writers of the historical fiction, steam punk, and sometimes the sci-fi and horror genres. They are publishing a series of their latest books (which I did some of the covers for, you can see the post here) and wanted me to create a logo for each of them to be used when promoting the new books.
Originally, Dharma’s idea was to have an artist’s profile caricature reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous logo. But as we hashed out some concepts and mockups, we started leaning away from the literal portrayal of Dharma – a tall, well dressed writer well known for his beret and pipe – and focused more on just those quintessential pieces of his style and trade. We isolated his pipe and introduced his favorite quill pen (he only writes with fine pens) into the logo concept. We created a classic shield setup with the pieces and added in a book to seal the picture of him as a novelist.
For the text of the logo I wanted the fonts and layout to be classic yet stylized – the sort of thing you would see on the old letterhead of an actor or production studio from the ’40s. I fiddled with slab and sans serif fonts as well as my own signature, handwritten font. After some labor with the orientation of all the elements, Dharma and his wife decided on this final layout. We kept the colors black and white with gray accents. Dharma liked the stark and dark quality of the monochromatic desaturated logo, traits that carry over into his style of writing and storytelling.
In the end Dharma and his wife Deanna were so pleased with the final product, and now I am working on Deanna’s logo as well as a co-author logo for them to use together on their new website. Here you can see the initial concepts I created for them and the rounds of revisions leading up to the final logo choice.
