Back when I was in college, I was set a very opened ended project, where I could create anything I wanted for my Graphic Design A-Level. This project was especially great for two reasons: the first being that I was allowed to work collaboratively with my twin, and the second being that I was allowed to create concept art- which I had, and still have, a huge passion for.

Willow and I began to plan a game, and create character designs and a narrative, but we realised that we didn’t have a game company logo. For the project, I created out game company logo, and Willow created the logo for the game itself.

We went through a few ideas for a company name, eventually deciding on ‘Two For One’, this was because our company would specialise on two player, local co-op games. As twins who both enjoy gaming, we have noticed the recent decline in these types of games, with mostly single-player campaigns, or online co-op being preferred by companies. With our identity and title established, I began to sketch out ideas:

From these initial sketches, I had absolutely no idea how to start designing a game company logo but was trying to focus on the aspect of togetherness that people get from two-player games. I also ended up deciding to change the game of the company to ‘One For Two’ instead, as we would be producing one game, for two people. This sparked some more ideas, and I began to notice interesting shapes in the letter ‘OFT’. I experimented with negative space, and drew multiple iterations.

Eventually, I reached the stage where I was ready to work digitally, and I created these designs:

With that, our logo for this project was complete, and I used it on all of the posters and game-covers that I made for the projects.

A few years later, Willow and I have decided to create an indie game over the summer. It’s two-player (naturally), so we decided to bring back OFT. The previous logo was about two years old, and I felt it looked dated and unappealing. From what I have learned over the course of my Graphic Design A-Level, and from the lecturers at university, I decided to create a new logo- building off and improving my previous ideas. I still liked the name and identity from OFT, so I went from there:

I kept the original logo in mind and made a few iterations using this as a base. My main issue with the previous logo was that it appeared to say OET rather than OFT, so I tried to combat this first. If I remember rightly -it was a while ago- I didn’t actually use a font for the original logo, I just created it myself out of shapes. This time, I chose a large, bold font and went from there. I made any iterations, trying to focus some of them on the negative space, and the shapes that I had found so interesting at the beginning. Out of these initial few, Willow and I discussed, and chose our favourites.

On the next page, I kept working with elements that we had liked from the previous two, keeping them on the page for reference. I created a few more designs, until I ended up with one that I thought was really interesting: I really liked the shape, and how it looked a bit like a speakerphone when landscape, and a lighthouse when portrait. At the time, I thought these would be final, and made a few iterations. One of my lecturers says that a good logo should be distinguishable in just greyscale, so I experimented with a stripe of colour -similar to the original design- and decided to explore a colour pallet at a later date.

After a few weeks of working on other projects, I returned to OFT. As cool as the shape was, I felt that the logo had become illegible, and that I should return my focus to readability. With this, I created another pass of logos:

I returned to the drawing board, keeping some of my favourite logos as inspiration on the left side. I tried to make the previous favourite logo more legible by sizing up the ‘O’ and moving it further away, but I still didn’t think it was enough. I began to experiment with a different font and kept focusing on how to make the shape between the ‘F’ and the ‘T’ visible, without transforming the ‘F’ into an ‘E’ shape.

After a few designs, I noticed that the logo was looking a little stiff. For an indie-game company run by two people, I didn’t want the logo to end up looking too corporate: this was fine when I was creating my college project, as it was hypothetical, and mostly mock-ups, but for actually creating games, I wanted it to look more friendly. I did a few more logos, and then consulted Willow for feedback.

We both liked the bottom one in the second column, so I created a new column of logos similar. We also decided to try the logo on a black background, as that’s probably how it would appear at the beginning of a game before the title. On the black, I was a little worried that it looked like a perfume, or whisky brand, but I thought the one on the end with the more playful ‘Games.’ font countered this pretty well. And with that, we had developed the new OFT logo.

Before fully committing, I tried one last experiment. Seeing as the games were all going to be two-player, I tried to fit the roman numerals for ‘2’ into the logo. I was able to pull this off, but I thought the blank logo just looked more appealing. And with this, I created a final version of our logo:

These are the fonts used to create the logo:

Overall, I really like the finished design. I think it looks like an indie game company, and definitely looks a lot more friendly than the original. I was a little sad about abandoning the cool shape between ‘FT’; however, I think the logo definitely benefited from it.