Negative Space Video Store Logo

The main task for this assignment was to create a logo for a fictional start-up video company called “Rewind Video”, a physical video store & rental place targeted towards nostalgic adults and retro-enthusiastic teens. The twist, though, was that the final logo had to utilize negative space within it; i.e., making the insinuation of a shape without the shape in question truly being there. In other words, allowing the mind to fill out the blanks itself with limited information. 

Below are all of the sketches for logo ideas I could personally come up with. You may notice that, unlike all of my other projects, the sketches here are all (albeit, crudely drawn) digital. This is primarily because I figured working with being able to fill in or block out certain shapes would be much more convenient, as well as the fact that I could use a completely black fill. Despite this, I feel as though many of the ideas missed the mark- except for 2… both of which simply made a “rewind symbol” using clever lettering. At the time, we simply decided to move forward with the leftmost pure-letter design, as it utilized negative space well, unlike the rest of the ideas. 

Getting into Illustrator, from the start I had decided I wanted to go with a much more unorthodox method of creating the logo. Essentially, I blocked it out using various squares, starting with a black box background, as well as two white triangles creating a rewind symbol. I then created a sizeable amount of extra white rectangles, triangles, and a few other shapes in order to… well, make out the letters that, by technicality, did not exist yet. After I had finished blocking everything out correctly, all I had to do was select everything and use the Shape Builder tool to make it all properly exist, with proper points, lines and the like. 

Sadly, due to this being the way I did this out, I don’t have any in-progress versions of the logo… but the finished version, as well as a smoothed-out version, are here to witness. 

Unfortunately, though, after some mulling it over, it was decided to scrap the model and create a new one from complete scratch, as the negative space could have been done in a better way. The text on the original could have been too hard to read or understand at a first glance. 

This time, I skipped straight to testing out in Illustrator. Instead of having custom hand-made type, I used regular text for the logo, letting the icon be the only thing following the negative space rules. This time, I used a 3D model of a VHS tape, which allowed me to put it at an angle and let only the shaded portions in the model be what makes up the negative space. Those parts of the model were turned entirely black, creating what we have now as the final logo! 

Overall, I think I could have done a little bit better on the redone version of the design… I still kind of prefer the original rewind iconography logo, although ultimately I understand why it didn’t work.