strangerpixel

About a year ago I decided my cycling blog Legs Feeling No Pressure needed a spruce-up. Since I started writing it I had always planned to design it properly, and was inspired by some nice-looking US-based bike sites, Velodramatic and Half Acre Cycling. Somehow UK-based cycling-related websites tend towards the less visually dynamic end of the spectrum, and I wanted to buck that trend.

The starting point was a visual identity for the blog. Legs Feeling No Pressure isn’t a brand as such – it’s just a slightly cryptic statement about what I get out of cycling – but as a name it needed a design that somehow communicated more than the name itself could do.

David Hardy, who is our LCF graphic designer and similarly a bike-nut (he’s into scooters), agreed to help me out, and we started knocking around some ideas. In a nutshell, here was my brief:

• bold, sans-serif typeface (although I do like some serifs used in the bike world’s, notably Rapha’s)
• no need to include cycling-related imagery like wheels (old hat)
• maybe a colour
• I like fancy Italian bikes but I also ride around town on a filthy hack (style vs grittiness?)

David got his head down, and a few thousand furious mouse-clicks later he supplied a suite of 18 draft logos.

Logo design drafts #1 sheet 1

Logo design drafts #1 sheet 2

Logo design drafts #1 sheet 3

I emailed the designs around a few friends to see what they thought. Perhaps predictably, this wasn’t a very useful step in deciding on an initial direction; some preferred N (the C-shaped design on sheet 2), but equally, others liked the tag styles, and quite a few actually liked the distressed font (B on sheet 1, which I instantly dismissed).

At this point we rejected a few, and moved forward with some others, exploring further the tag style as well as adding in a cheeky wrench-head / Pacman design (N, below):

Logo design drafts #2

Personally, I was leaning more towards version I – a rounded, surfy, retro tag with a mixture of bold sans-serif and ‘classic’ serif that I thought echoed the masterful pairing of typefaces in the Rapha Condor logo. However, as so often happens with logo design, hours of close examination had made the words ‘Legs Feeling No Pressure’  themselves practically incomprehensible as a phrase. We needed some distance.

A couple of days later we arrived at a final three:

Draft #3 option 1

Draft #3 option 2

Draft #3 option 3

It was David who swayed me towards option 1: he reasoned that a) I took cycling quite seriously, so I ought to have a solid, bold logo, instead of a tag more at home on a pair of board shorts; and b) that the crisp edges of option 1 would look better in a blog header anyway.

The next question was that of colour. David prepared a fourth suite of options, which introduced a red element, and also offered some variations on the solid serif, just to make absolutely sure we had the right one:

Draft #4 sheet 1

Draft #4 sheet 2

One final touch was the addition of the tagline ‘What I think about when I think about cycling’, which I borrowed from Haruki Murakami’s book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Now I could see that our original bold serif was still working really well, and that it was now perfectly finished by the red ‘No’, with the patterned gradient within it suggesting all kinds of training-related things like hills, heart rate, and precision.

We had it – the finished logo:

The finished logo, including tagline.