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3d CarMax logo illustrations

0 February 12, 2016 Standard

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I’ve been on a roll with my airliner template collection over the past two years or so, but my main interest in art and design continues to be 3d modeling and rendering. It’s still a core part of my billable work these days (which I’m thankful for), but I will admit that I haven’t had as much time as I would like to create the fun “logo” renderings that I used to do all the time several years back. It’s not like I’ve grown out of that kind of conceptual illustration, but there are so many other things that have a higher priority these days. But very now and then (like now) I get an itch that needs to be scratched…

Several weeks ago I bought a car though CarMax, and I’ve got to say that it was a surprisingly pleasant experience. I was so happy as a matter of fact, that I wrote a lengthy article for a my automotive blog (yet another one of my endless list of side projects) describing how it all went down. It was a long article – pretty much what I’d call an intimidating wall of text, so I desperately needed some images and illustrations to sprinkle in order to make it look somewhat inviting to read. I know that I hate to read large blocks of text without any visual breaks, so I thought I would give my readers a break and add in some flair – norebbo style!

3d rendering of a FOR SALE sign with an odometer that spells “CARMAX” integrated into it

The main issue I faced was that the CarMax logo is basically…well…plain and simple. These two traits don’t translate well into to fun and interesting 3d renderings, so I had to get a bit creative and add in a host of other elements and objects in order to make things interesting. The overall theme I stuck to was buying and selling (that’s what CarMax does), so I resisted the urge to get too crazy and create illustrations that ventured too far off that path. Besides, I’ve learned long ago that less is more, and sticking with a single concept is better than aimlessly creating a set of conceptual and editorial illustrations that don’t make much sense. I was guilty of doing that in my early days (moreso than I’d like to admit), but these days I only create these kinds of renderings when I need to illustrate a specific idea or concept. You probably noticed that with my Harley Davidson and Starbucks image sets – these were both relatively small collections and I pretty much stopped when I ran out of ideas (unlike my Apple logo series, which went on for far too long).

3d rendering of the yellow and blue CarMax logo surrounded by stacks of gold coins over a dark blue background

3d rendering of a transparent glass CarMax logo with a bright red SALE tag attached to it

It felt pretty good to roll my sleeve up and crank this set of illustrations out. I’m still doing these in FormZ, by the way, despite my claim several years ago that I was switching over to Maya. I’m still using Maya quite a bit, but not for this kind of work. FormZ is much better for simpler renderings like this (Maya takes foreeeeeeeever to render, lol) and it’s only going to get better once V-Ray for FormZ is officially released. I can’t wait!

3d Harley Davidson logos

1 September 11, 2015 Standard

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I’m a pretty big fan of the iconic orange and black Harley Davidson logo, and I’ve been trying to find the time to create some 3d illustrations of it for the past year or so. Heck – it’s been a while since I’ve done any of these Norebbo-style 3d logo renderings, but the illustrations of the new Google logo I created last week was enough to get me itching to do some more. So here you go – this is a full set of 3d renderings featuring the Harley Davidson logo posing with a variety of objects!

I ended up creating two versions of it – one that’s completely 3d (a simple extrusion of all objects in the logo), and a flat version with the only 3d element being the surrounding bezel. I actually thought that I was going to use the flat one the most, but I quickly found that the fully 3d version worked better in a lot of these different scenarios. The image immediately below is the flat version – it seemed to work well in this instance because of the hard gloss and bright reflection, but it didn’t work out so well in other environments.

Harley Sale! 3d rendering of a large red SALE tag attached to a metallic Harley Davidson logo

Here are the rest of the images that feature the fully 3d version:

Building a Harley – 3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo with puzzle piece letters

Harley Davidson noise – 3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo with a large speaker cut out of the center

Harley Engineering – 3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo with a hole cut out in the center revealing a large gear

Harley Davidson Facebook like – 3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo with a large blue Facebook Like button in teh center

Harley precision – 3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo with a large pair of precision calipers sitting on top of it

3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo over a dark gray surface

Although the fully modeled (3d) version looked the best, it was by far the most difficult one to work with due to how Form-Z generates solid objects. In a nutshell, smooth (solid) objects in Form-Z are very dense – and there are lot of individual pieces that make up this logo. All those individual pieces made for a very complex object which brought my computer to it’s knees every time I moved it within the environment so it was a real pain to have to fine tune positioning and make small adjustments.

I could have spent weeks creating different variations of this Harley logo (yeah, I like it that much), but I decided to cap it at these 8 illustrations. I can certainly make more depending on how popular these are, and as a matter of fact I’ve got a ton of other ideas which might make for some pretty cool renderings. But there’s no point if nobody needs them!

3d renderings of the new Google logo

0 September 3, 2015 Standard

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I’m not sure how I missed it, but Google updated their logo earlier this week and produced a really good set of design guidelines for it. All I can say to that is: FINALLY! Their previous logo looked like something that was created in Microsoft Word way back in 1997, two hours or so right before a big meeting. It was in dire need of a refresh, especially considering how much emphasis this company has been putting on visual design over the past few years.

The new Google logo in a chrome and glass finish

I’ve already produced a full set of 3d renderings featuring the old Google logo, and back then it was really difficult to come up with a collection of images that I was happy with. The old logo was really hard to work with – mostly because it didn’t look sophisticated enough IMHO – and I was never really happy with that set. But this new logo is much better! It’s based on simple geometric shapes that look very balanced when spelling out the “Google” title, and the added benefit to this simplicity is how easy it is to animate. These animations and transitions are a core part of the current Google design language, and I like what they came up with very much. Also, I didn’t realize it until I started building the 3d model, but the circular shapes are not exactly symmetrical – this is a truly custom font that took a bit of work to replicate on my own. I’m not sure I would have even noticed that if I hadn’t created these renderings!

Large magnifying glass hovering over top of a chrome Google logo

Anyway, a long time client of mine needed a few quick 3d illustrations of the new logo for a presentation he was working on and these three are what I came up with. The primary focus of these illustrations was to emphasize “search” and “settings” topics, so it wasn’t really important to render the logo exactly as it was designed. As a matter of fact, it was more important for the objects themselves (tools and magnifying glass) to be more prominent than the logo so that’s why I didn’t use color. Yes, I realize that I broke nearly every guideline in their design documentation, but these are just conceptual images anyway so it’s not that big of a deal. I just hope the Google Brand Police don’t come knocking on my door…

On a side note, flat design is all the rage these days so it’s been interesting and fun to take flat logos such as this and translate them into 3d. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t – but it’s the challenge that I enjoy so much.

3d Google Plus logo renderings

0 October 27, 2014 Standard

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About 6 weeks ago reader Unicorn left a comment in the post about my LinkedIn logo 3d illustrations, curious to know if I had any Google Plus illustrations that were similar. I didn’t at the time, but I thought it would be a really quick and easy thing to do. Always willing to accept a challenge (assuming I have the time), I decided to start an all-new full batch of renderings featuring the updated Google Plus logo. The previous set that I created is long out of date, so I figured that this would be a good opportunity for a refresh.

Unfortunately, the hectic nature of daily life got in the way nearly as soon as I started. I was only able to create two illustrations before things got really busy again, and the truth is that so much time has passed that I don’t really have any desire to finish the set. I’ve got way too many other things I’d rather be working on!

3d rendering of floating bubbles with red Google Plus logos inside over a red background

Anyway, the Google + logo hasn’t changed much from my first set – color treatment is the main difference. Where it used to be mostly black with blocks of bright color used as accents, the official mark is simply red and white now. That ties in a lot better to their flat design language, and it should work just as well with their new Material design language which is due to be launched within weeks. Perhaps there’s a new Google + logo coming as well? Possibly.

On a side note, these are the first 3d renderings I’ve created in the new version of FormZ. Although my time with v8.0 has been limited thus far, I do have to say that I like it quite a bit. Looking forward to playing with it some more.

Final version of the SuperUser logo

0 September 25, 2014 Standard

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Last July I posted the losing concept for a logo I was developing for SuperUser (as part of a corporate User Experience team building event), and now that the games are over, I thought that I might as well post the winning version. I have absolutely no use for this logo anymore, and I’m posting it here in hopes that someone can use it for something cool and let the brand live on!

Instead of using thin strokes like I did for the previous version, I decided to go bold and heavy with this one. It’s based loosely on the Super Man logo – which I thought was totally appropriate for what this design was supposed to represent. Our team was looking for a logo that looked tough and would stand out well printed on a shirt, and at the end of the day I thought it did both remarkably well. Unfortunately, conveying a feeling of strength and power did absolutely nothing to propel our team to victory. As a matter of fact, we finished the season in last place.

On a side note, I had a lot of other ideas for this logo which I thought would have worked pretty well. A lack of time prevented me from doing more concepts, but some of the things I wanted to try included: super hero silhouettes, clenched fists, and even some cool 1960’s hippie art. Vector illustration is not my strength anyway, so perhaps it’s best that I didn’t try and frustrate myself trying to create complex art like that…

Anyway, please do me (and my team) a huge favor and use this logo in successful way. Go SuperUser!

Vector SuperUser logo

0 July 17, 2014 Standard

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I work with a bunch of highly-talented UX designers on a daily basis, and every now and then we do team-building events that allow us to get away for a few hours and get to know each other a little better. It’s a fairly large group of designers, so it’s not really surprising that one of our favorite events is to break into smaller teams and compete against each other in a variety of fun games. It’s usually pretty crazy – and sometimes quite humiliating – but everyone seems to have a good time. The team who scores the most points during the event gets bragging rights until the next series of games rolls around months later.

This time around, I was assigned to a team who decided on the name “SuperUser”. Being the only visual designer in the group, it was up to me to create an official logo for us – a logo that would be printed on brightly-colored t-shirts that would serve as our official team uniform.

I created several quick options, and the one that you see here was the loser. I’m actually glad that it wasn’t chosen, because I think that I would have preferred the outlines of the text and the star to be thicker. Doing so wouldn’t have been an easy change, as I’d pretty much have to go in and rebuild the entire thing from scratch. I was dreading that big time while the voting was going on!

So…I’ve (obviously) got no use for this now. However, if by off-chance that you find yourself on a corporate sporting team of UX designers named “SuperUser” – and are without a logo for your uniform, I’ve got you covered. You can download the file zip file containing the Adobe Illustrator (.ai) file by clicking here.

3d Skype logo illustrations

2 Comments June 28, 2014 Standard

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I’ll admit it: I’ve never been much of a Skype user. It’s a great product, don’t get me wrong, but the introvert in me doesn’t really have much of a need (or want) for social technology such as this. All communication to my family and friends far away is easily and conveniently accomplished with email, sprinkled in with the occasional text and phone call from time to time. I’m about as far from the typical Skype user as it gets!

Even though I’m not anywhere near to being a Skype power-user, I do appreciate it’s usefulness and I fully understand why it’s so popular. As a matter of fact, I have friends who keep in touch with family overseas, and it blows my mind each and every time. How can anyone not get excited about free HD video chat? If I were an ultra-social person, I’m fairly confident that Skype would be my number one favorite app.

3d rendering of a movie production clap board with a Skype logo in chalk on the front

And that leads me to my latest 3d illustration set: Skype logos! I didn’t really plan on doing a set for this communications power-house app, but it’s been a while since I’ve created any stock 3d illustrations and this seemed like as good of a choice as anything else in my “to do” list. It’s a logo that I’ve always liked, so that helped to make the decision to bust out this set that much easier.

3d rendering of a partially disassembled blue skype logo showing gears on the inside

The Skype logo is actually pretty simple. It’s just a simplified cloud shape with a large “S” in the center of it, so before I started I was a bit worried that it would be too plain to do anything interesting with. I did find that to be the case initially – the first renderings I created featured a straight representation of the logo with a flat face and beveled edges. They weren’t very interesting.

I eventually discovered that carving a section out of the face so that the “S” stood out was all it needed to give the logo some added visual interest without straying too far from the Skype brand – anyone should be able to look at these and immediately tell what company they represent. At least I hope so!

3d rendering of a pair of black sunglasses posing in front of a large blue and white Skype logo

I also created some versions in other configurations, just for the sake of experimentation and variety. But I definitely think I prefer the cloud version with the recessed center.

3d rendering of a set of keys with Skype logos embedded into them

3d rendering of an upright blue Skype logo with a wrench and screwdriver standing in front of it

Here are some others that I did which I’ll may (or may not) upload higher res versions of later:

More Skype logo renderings are available on my store

Feel free to use these however you wish, and a link back to my site would be much appreciated. Thanks for looking!

Ford logo illustrations

2 Comments March 1, 2014 Standard

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Right after finishing my GM logo illustration set, I thought that there’s really no reason why I shouldn’t render some Ford logos as well. After all, the Ford logo is more complex and I thought it would be more fun to render. So…here you go!

To be honest, things didn’t start out so well. The shape of the logo is odd and it was hard to compose with other objects. I usually like to render objects that are symmetrical all around as opposed to oblong shapes such as this, and the designer in me was sort of thrown off balance trying to find compositions that work. It’s not as easy as it looks, and I probably spent too long with this set than I should have. But I think I captured the essence of the brand with these – there’s some techy stuff, industrial concepts, and some that are more plain which focus on the logo itself.

While I’m on the subject of the Ford logo, can I say that I think it’s time for a rebrand? My thinking is that Ford has really come a long way in the past 5-10 years, producing some world-class cars and trucks that are light-years better than the crap they were producing in the 80’s and 90’s. Their logo doesn’t reflect that at all – it’s too classical for my tastes, with the frilly script and overuse of chrome. I think there’s a real opportunity here to evolve the mark using modern typography and materials which reflect the types of automotive products they are producing today.

Anyway, are some medium-res versions of this Ford logo set:

3d rendering of a large red and white lifesaver hanging on a metal and glass Ford logo over a dark blue background

3d rendering of a glossy metal and glass Ford logo sitting on top of a red SALE tag

3d rendering of a large wrench and screwdriver sitting on top of a bolted metal plaque with the Ford Motor Company logo carved out of it

3d rendering of a ring of transparent binary digits orbiting around a frosted glass Ford logo over a dark blue background

3d rendering of a large wrench and screwdriver lying in front of an upright transparent glass Ford Motor Company logo over a dark gray background

3d illustration of a glowing blue Ford and pulse graphic logo sitting on top of a glossy microchip

3d rendering of two chrome automotive engine pistons lying over top of a large metallic Ford Motor Company logo over a gray background

Thanks for looking! Remember, you may use these images however you wish (although you may not redistribute them yourself), and a link back to my site is always appreciated.

Stock illustrations featuring the GM (General Motors) logo

2 Comments February 8, 2014 Standard

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It may seem as if I used a great deal of restraint in creating this set of stock illustrations featuring the iconic blue General Motors logo, but to be honest, my goal with this set wasn’t to highlight their faults. Yeah, it would have been all too easy to take cheap shots at ‘em and create an image set full of doom and gloom metaphors – but I purposefully held back a bit and decided to play nice.

Despite a long history of producing poor quality cars and trucks, I just can’t lower myself to drag them through the mud any more than they have been already. And besides – they’ve really stepped up their game over the last few years and are really starting to produce some high-quality products that rival any other car maker in the world. I’d have no shame in buying a GM product today, and as a matter of fact, I think that a shiny new C7 Z06 would look downright fantastic in my garage. Just sayin’…

In terms of their logo, I personally think that they are due for a good old-fashioned rebrand. After all, they have turned their business around quite remarkably in the past few years, and despite some minor lingering issues, they are a reborn car company. So why are they still using their old square blue logo? I don’t know – and I’m not necessarily a logo designer myself so I’ll let some other designer play with some conceptual ideas that represent a fresh new beginning.

Anyway – I wanted to capture the current essence of GM with these 3d renderings, so that meant focusing primarily on compositions that show getting down to business and producing quality products. Ok, I did have to make at least one illustration with a lifesaver as the main object, but otherwise, I played nice.

Hopefully you’ll find use for some of these in your blogs and articles. Please send me a link to show me how you use them!

3d illustration of two large pencils sitting on top of an unrolled set of blueprints showing a drawing of a GM logo

3d rendering of a disassembled General Motors app icon over a dark blue surface

3d illustration of a large blue battery featuring a GM logo with chrome exhaust headers attached to it hovering over a gray reflective surface

3d rendering of an all white General Motors V8 engine over a white surface

3d rendering of large chrome screws, springs, and nuts lying over top a blueprint drawing of a General Motors logo

3d illustration of a large syringe lying in front of a large transparent white GM logo over a blue background

3d rendering of a large frosted glass General Motors logo over a dark blue reflective surface

3d illustration of a clear glass light bulb lying in front of a large chrome General Motors logo

3d rendering of a large chrome and blue General Motors logo over a dark gray reflective surface

3d illustration of multiple stacks of gold coins with General Motors logos printed on them

3d rendering of a chrome General Motors logo sitting inside of a large red and white lifesaver over a blue reflective surface

Stock illustrations featuring 3d NFL logos

3 Comments January 29, 2014 Standard

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It occurred to me the other day that I’ve got a pile of old illustrations that I haven’t yet uploaded to this blog. I’m not entirely sure how that happens, but I assume it’s because I create them with the intention of doing one thing with them, then I change my mind once they are complete. From there, they go into my archive to be “dealt with later”, but in reality, I forget about them until I stumble across them years later by pure accident.

That just so happens to be the case with these older renderings I created which feature the NFL (National Football League) logo. You may recall the first batch that I uploaded back in 2012, but I created another round of them one year later – just as the 2013 NFL season was getting underway here in the US. It should be noted that this batch of NFL logo renderings are mostly intended to be used as background images for banners, presentations, or posters – as opposed to being plain 3d logos hovering in space. This was entirely intentional because I was in need of some background images for some presentation templates I was working on at the time.

All of the NFL logos depicted in these stock images are metal or glass – some with a metallic football, and some without. I am offering these here free for the taking, so feel free to use these however you wish.

3d illustration of an NFL logo behind a transparent silver American football over a bronze silk background

3d illustration of a transparent glass NFL football logo over a dark green football field background

3d illustration of a transparent glass NFL logo over a silver background

3d illustration of an NFL logo behind a transparent silver American football over a silver and gray background

3d illustration of an NFL logo behind a transparent silver American football on top of a green football field