Blacksteel Logo Design

Hello Dear Reader!

Sometimes, I make things. Most of the time I don’t think they turn out very well, but every once in a while I do a half-way decent job. The Blacksteel Logo is perhaps one of my favorite logos I’ve ever designed. So I thought maybe I would talk about how I designed it and why I like it.

Dustin, Phil and I went back and forth for weeks trying to decide on a good company name for the publishing company. Eventually we settled on Blacksteel Press.

Blacksteel comes from the name of the Blacksteel Rangers, which are an infamous mercenary troop from Aruthian, which feature very heavily into Cas Be Talan’s story. (This is Dustin’s main character from the Sellsword Saga).

Once we had the name, then it was up to me to come up with a logo for us.

I wanted a font that felt sharp and strong. I also wanted a serifed typeface (that means the letters have the little things on the end of them), so that it felt a little medieval-y as well. Eventually I settled on Charlemagne Std Bold. It met those criteria for me.

Here are some other fonts that I was considering at the time. Charlemange is the top option.

The Blacksteel Rangers are named thus because of the Blacksteel armor they wear. It is forged in a special forge in nothern Aruthian from the Cinder Forge, which used to belong to the giants, but the territory was won back from Vigabrock by the Aruthians and thus they claimed the cinder forge. Blacksteel armor may or may not have some magical properties. I digress.

So forging is important to the rangers, and I also wanted an element of fantasy. Something that I feel is fairly universally recognized as being something of a fantasy story is the story of King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. So I wanted to combine this idea of an anvil, which is an essential tool in forging, and Cas’s giant mercenary sword, and give a nod to some of the original fantasy stories from my childhood like King Arthur and the sword and the stone.

So I started looking at anvils and thought, maybe I could make the letter P for “Press” into the shape of the horn of the anvil. I also got to looking and the “T” in Blacksteel looked like it might make a nice sword hilt and crossguard, and sure enough, when I flipped it upside down it looks like a pretty decent sword hilt, so I put a blade on it. A lot of this part of the process takes place on tracing paper, making tiny adjustments over and over until I like what I have. The originals are buried in a drawer somewhere, and frankly I don’t have the energy to go look for them. Besides, it’s not very exciting. Trust me on this.

Anyway, at the end of lots of tracing and fiddling and refining, and then scanning, I make a vector file in Illustrator. This is what the Blacksteel Logo Mark looks like.

All that is left is add the text back in and adjust the spacing between the letters. (And for all you designer type nerds out there: adjusting the spacing between individual letters is called kerning. Adjusting the spacing between all the letters is called tracking. Adjusting the space between the line height is called leading.) So once that was done we ended up with this:

So there you have it! The story behind how I created the Blacksteel Press Logo and why it’s designed the way it is. I’d love to know if you want to see more of these creative process type posts.

Till next time dear reader, go doodle or do something creative you enjoy. Even if you feel like you’re not very good at it, as long as you have fun, that’s what matters. AND, you might just create something you enjoy every once in a while. <3 Tiff

In defense of Hard.

Mahjong with my brother