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The CUT Logo |
Many people have asked about the CUT logo. Most people like it, although there have been a few unflattering comparisons with the Conservative Party's graphics, and many wonder how it came to pass. It's a long story of muddling around coupled with - literally - an instant of luck.
First of all, we spent weeks trying to get professionals to design a logo. We approached graphic designers, packaging designers, artists, even a stained-glass designer ... all refused. They usually commented that logos were 'difficult' and 'too subjective'. I can certainly understand this; my company's logo, which has lasted for thirty years unchanged, started off as a doodle on a scrap of paper. Of course, the trick is to be able to distinguish between doodle as just that and doodle as the germ of an idea ...
So, in desperation, we tried rather more technically sophisticated doodling ourself. One afternoon in February Erol Ziya, Nick Mailer and myself sat ourselves in front of Erol's PC with a graphics tablet and Photoshop and Illustrator open. Four hours later it was dark; tempers had flared and subsided; the cat had been kicked; the carpet had been chewed; tea had been drunk; cigarettes had been smoked; and Erol, as I remember, was distractedly pushing the letters C U T round the screen.
Digression: some time before then we had converted the characters into vectors. So, instead of the T being a single character, it was a group of line segments; to understand the instant of luck, try to visualise the bottom left-hand corner of the crossbar of the T.
Erol dragged that corner of the T but, instead of the whole crossbar widening, the bottom left dragged
out into a sharp point as he had not previously selected the whole character. All three of us, who by
now were half-asleep, instantaneously woke up and realised we were on to something. I think it was Nick
who suggested that we put a small piece on top of the point but slightly separated from it to show a
cut. Erol then suggested that that piece took a different colour. As the three characters were, somehow,
blue we tried red; it worked.
Half an hour later, after lining everything up and trying out fonts, and negotiating a false turn when we applied a similar cut to the bottom of the C, we had our logo:
For font spotters, the C and U are capital letters in Century Gothic; the T is a lower-case t in that font with segments chopped off and added. That would seem to be a strange thing to do but, as I remember, it was something to do with getting the widths of the overlapping characters right. The text, prompted by my ancestral memory of fonts on the Office 97 CD, started off as Rockwell.
On seeing our efforts, Martin Eager applied his expert's touch; he tidied things up and
used Painter to produce liquid metallic
effects, threw away the Rockwell font as it became fuzzy at low resolutions, and replaced it with the much
crisper Trebuchet MS. Done!
As you will see from the site, elements of the logo and a colour scheme prompted by it are everywhere.