About this logo

This was Jeff's entry for the logo contest held for Sintel.

Don't care about how it was done? Jump directly to the logo below!

The process

I started by doing a "back of the envelope" (litterally!) concept sketch:

Then I went sketching/drawing the characters on paper for an hour or so, scanned it:

...then traced everything by hand with paths on top of the lineart. I used masks to achieve color effects and live path effects to create scales on the dragon's skin. I wanted to do everything in pure vector art, self-contained in Inkscape's feature set. That means no cheating with GIMP/raster texture images, which made the process a bit more difficult and a lot more CPU intensive.

This was the first time I was doing such a complex drawing in Inkscape, so it took me many days to accomplish this (this is why I haven't posted the design earlier). I spent over 15 hours doing the design, but it was quite educational.

Modular/customizeable design

As you can see with the large amount of variants below, I tried to keep everything modular, on separate layers or with masks or dynamic effects that can be adjusted independently. This means that if I want to change the colors of gradient, or change the dragon's scales, I can do so quite easily. Pretty much everything is customizeable. Having separate layers also allows me to turn "logo features" on and off: for example, I can show/hide the scales, Sintel's clothing details, the little heart above the dragon's head (that one was just for fun/comic relief!), switch between the "raised arm" varia and the "arm on the hip" variant, etc.

Realism/coherence with the movie's actual models

There are plenty of badass dragons out there, and I have seen lots of really nice "stylized" dragons logos. However, my approach has been, since the beginning, to stick as much as possible to the actual, official concept art and the 3D models that were to be used in the film. I tried to keep the proportions as close to the originals as possible. In this case I based myself on the 3D model (revision 1b) rather than the concept art.

Inspiration from the game industry

I have looked at some logos done for various videogames. The Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid series have some of the best artwork out there. I feel that their approach can be applied to movies such as Sintel, and, as such, mimicked some key aspects of their style.

Legibility

I haven't done really fancy text because I believe legibility (being able to read the text clearly and easily at any size) is more important. Thus, I used the libre font "Linux Biolinum", which is an elegant blend of serif and sans serif fonts. It is from the same authors as the awesome "Linux Libertine" fonts.

Also, I think that, aesthetically, it is better to provide a "plain" font to go with the drawing, otherwise, everything becomes a drawing, and it takes a bit away from the "logo" definition.

Finally, I've seen some nice fancy fontwork among the other submissions. Nothing prevents us, if you folks really want fancy text, to combine my drawings with someone else's fontwork (but again, it may impair legibility ;)

Details and scalability

According to my basic testing, the high level of fine details in the drawings don't seem to cause any problems for lower resolutions of the logo (even at crazy sizes like 128x128; but I doubt the Blender Institute will use it at such sizes). However, since the design is modular, details can be removed for lower resolutions, if required.

The main submission

It still looks nice in a small resolution or when seen from afar:

Here's how it could look like onto movie footage:

Variants

There are many possibilities. You can show or hide the following elements: Sintel's clothing details, the dragon's scales, the heart, the text shadow, etc. You can change the colors of Sintel and the Dragon, the text, etc. Some parts of the drawing are transparent and should have an interesting effect with moving contents behind them. The text can be replaced by anything you want. Details can be added or removed as needed. You can switch between two versions of Sintel: one in which she extens her arm towards the dragon, in a friendly or loving gesture, and the other in which she has her arm on her hip, thus having a more "badass", "defiant" or "dominant" stance in relation to the dragon. That particular version might look better on an animated background (the movie itself), because it lessens the psychological gap between "still image" and "live background".

Here are some of the possibilities:

Arm on the hip ("badass Sintel") version

"Yuna vs Sin" version

"No dragon scales, more details on Sintel" version

Silly versions/others

See the love love version, the workview (masks and stuff) screenshot, or the original flaming red and green version.