Designing the Lakum insignia (U8)
A friend of mine asked me to design him an insignia for him to use as part of an Online gaming community based in the Halo fandom and would therefore represent them in the virtual space, both on Xbox and on PC.
I was given a brief that consisted of very vague and open ended requests which allowed for a lot of creative liberties. I was drawn a simple layout of how he wanted the logo to look. Didn't have any detail and wouldn't of meant anything to anyone who didn't know the previous conversations and design specifications. It consisted of a circle with 7 small vertical lines above it with a curved line underneath. To anyone else it would've look a weird smiling cyclops. I used this as a template although to avoided the curved arc because it would've looked kinda goofy, plus the simplicity of a straight banner would've worked better with the aesthetic I wanted to establish. Which would've matched the theme of the group combining the covenant aesthetic seen in the halo games with a foreground resembling the more ancient Forerunner Architecture that this group is known for using in the game.
(I'm going to be frank, this is going to get kinda complicated to explain to someone unfamiliar with the geeky terminology. I'll try and make it simple, and try not to get too side tracked along the way. The point of this post is to highlight my skills development and understanding of unfamiliar software. In this case it's Photoshop, I've probably used Photoshop for about 2 minutes prior to this commission.)
After receiving my design specifications I got to work gathering my two main assets that I'd be using during this commission. And those would be the central emblem and the swords.
The Lakum sigil
Getting the emblem that would be the main feature of this insignia would be easy. The emblem itself is created as part of Halo's customization and I would can be found online via HaloWaypoint.com.
The service record on Halo Waypoint was where I got the emblem and although this version was small, I was able to enlarge it and improve the quality in Photoshop.
The Swords
The swords featured in the insignia represent each member of the community. So they were going to be modified to match the colour representing each member. So I needed to find a simple looking sword with a a plain colour so I could use the paint bucket tool in Photoshop to quickly colour the swords differently. This is where Google is my best friend.
After finding a suitable sword that met my criteria I moved it to Photoshop and started to build a mock up of what I wanted to build. After I completed the basic mock up of the insignia I had one last part to do and would be the most complicated and time consuming part.
Sangheili Glyphs
The banner under the emblem had to be written in Sangheili glyphs. (Alien language) Which luckily translates directly into the English Language. At least as far as we know.
As I was completely new to Photoshop I had to learn how to crop all of these assets from their respective backgrounds and apply them to different layers. This was time consuming especially for the individual characters in the Sangheili language. Learning to use the magic wand tool was annoying at first but with some practice I was able to quickly use the tool for cropping shapes and applying them.
After creating the base emblem. I had an idea. This community only consists of seven members at a time, although there have been members that have been and left in the past. So my idea was to make a tribute to the members that were, by creating hieroglyphs on the pillars on either side of the main emblem with the initials of those members on them in Sangheili glyphs. For me to do this I asked my friend to list as many as he could and I got around 25 names. Each of these glyphs would be back-lit using the "inner glow" tool in the preferences.
The final result is something both me and m friend are very happy with and I personally don't think I could improve the design even i I wanted to. This digital graphic took me approximately 2 days consisting of 12 hours of actual development time.