Wood Chips

I was "commissioned" to design logos for my fantasy baseball league a while back. I kinda finished one of the division logos, but quit while working on the other because it became a lot tougher than it should have been.

Last week while our internet was out, I was bored enough to get back into Illustrator and finally whip up my own team logo. I had the idea planned for a long time, actually, and felt motivated enough to create it.

I drew up the idea on a scratch piece of paper (remember that phrase? Scratch paper?) and then scanned the image onto my computer and went along with tracing it in Illustrator. Tracing and the pen tool are essential skills in Illustrator.

I layered the explosions, the bat, the ball, and the text. I played around with maybe a half dozen different fonts, and settled on the one you will see below. The orange and yellow are also just quick selections, made light enough so that the black text doesn't disappear in the tones. The ball wasn't as tough as before, since last year I did a similar technique when designing a tennis ball.

Well, here you go.

I've played around a bit with different colors, different stroke widths, and a few more fonts, but I keep coming back to this initial concept as the most solid. I might reshape it into a more squared-off shape so it has equal height and width, so it can be used without getting the sides cut off.

Also, I want to point out that the week I designed this logo, I also went 10-0 in my matchup in our fantasy league and jumped into first place.