EHW Merch?

[The Pook]

9 minutes ago, iamjanco said:

 

 If you can afford a 4090, you can afford a subscription to Adobe CS.

 

can't wait til you give me my 4090, I can finally get a legit copy of PS 

[ENTERPRISE]

22 hours ago, neurotix said:

 

I can try my best to imitate jans design and remake it the same way but transparent. I have the font used. I can make it 3000x5000 and as a transparent png for Printly. It would be a good learning experience for me, bending text around a circle is not easy in GIMP.

 

Otherwise jan would need to upload the design, again fully transparent in a png and a psd. That's up to him.

 

22 hours ago, iamjanco said:

 

Sent--check your inbox, E. Cheers. also, you might want the two stars changed to the same off-red that the top half is in.  If you've got both Illustrator and Photoshop, you shouldn't have a problem doing that if that's your preference.

 

but let me know if you need some wax on, wax-off training.

 

Thanks guys

[neurotix]

14 hours ago, iamjanco said:

a slightly different version of the one i ginned up earlier:

 

 

 

 

Looks great on that red. Nice work.

[firedfly]

On 13/06/2024 at 09:50, damric said:

I want a ball cap. Someone buy me one and make my day. Are they only in white? I would prefer like charcoal gray.

 

@ENTERPRISE Is it possible to get a ball cap in gray?  I would prefer a grey one to the white one as well.

[damric]

52 minutes ago, firedfly said:

 

@ENTERPRISE Is it possible to get a ball cap in gray?  I would prefer a grey one to the white one as well.

yeah the white one, after seeing yours, gets dirty! A black one is nice except it's too hot here to wear black hats  A couple shades of gray would be perfect.

[firedfly]

1 hour ago, damric said:

yeah the white one, after seeing yours, gets dirty! A black one is nice except it's too hot here to wear black hats  A couple shades of gray would be perfect.

 

To be fair, mine got dirty when I wore it driving a TANK through a mud pit.  I'm not going to blame the hat on that one

[neurotix]

I had an idea in my head for about a week now, a variation of text around the circle logo, but using the site's logo. I knew how to wrap text around a circle in GIMP, but the transform tools don't really allow you to properly wrap an image around a circle. Then thankfully I found this site. Making my idea possible.

 

 

Hope you guys all like it, and would love to hear @ENTERPRISEs opinion.

 

Attached is a zip with all the assets, and the transparent one used for printing is: round-ehw-logo.png

ex-round-ehw-logo.zip

[Snakecharmed]

As a designer who is not taking part in this effort, I'm going to offer the following feedback:

 

Corporate branding guidelines universally disallow the manipulation of their logos because that dilutes the integrity of the logo and the brand. In other words, bending the EHW.net wordmark would never be permissible if it were under the care of either an in-house marketing department or a professional third-party agency.

 

The circle is badly aliased.

 

There's a noticeable and unsightly stretch around the outer circumference of all the circular text. In addition, the tracking of the motto looks forcibly compressed as do the characters themselves.

 

The stars in iamjanco's example exist for readability purposes because it's jarring to flip the orientation of your text 180° while reading along the arc without a visual break.

 

Also, as for general advice, don't use a raster program to make and manipulate logos. If you don't want to pay for Adobe Illustrator CC (and I can't blame anyone for not wanting to), then try Affinity Designer. GIMP is not a serious design tool, and it's even less appropriate for what should be vector designs.

Edited June 19 by Snakecharmed

[neurotix]

I don't even know how to respond to that other than saying I disagree with most of it. I worked hard on this. Sorry you don't like it.

 

Let me just add that this is a relatively small internet forum, not a large corporation. Things don't need to be perfect. I do this because I enjoy it. I don't think bending the logo around a circle is such a big deal, I just thought it was a neat idea to try. Whether or not other people like it remains to be seen. If it's really that bad then I suppose I'll give up doing graphics for the site or this thread.

Edited June 19 by neurotix

[Snakecharmed]

You're free to disagree. I'm not knocking your effort either. If anything, I'm pointing them out for you to understand where you can improve, but there isn't much to dispute in the scope of a professional design critique.

 

There's a reason why top shelf graphics designers are in the positions they're in even when the profession as a whole is a lot less lucrative than it used to be. Every designer worth their salt would have noticed the same things I did.

[neurotix]

See my edit I just made, please. And don't think I don't appreciate the feedback, I'm just not a perfectionist nor a professional. I'm not really sure what I could do to fix the issues you pointed out, but I don't think they make it garbage and/or unusable either.

Edited June 19 by neurotix

[Snakecharmed]

I see your edit now and I appreciate where you're coming from. I'm not saying nor suggesting that it's garbage, nor am I trying to discourage you from trying to refine your work. I'm sorry if it came across as overly critical.

 

As an enthusiast, I would want to learn why a professional would or wouldn't do things a certain way. Design is neither wholly driven by feeling nor technical accuracy, but like any skill, hobby, or profession, one has to master the fundamentals before they can justifiably bend the rules. Otherwise, it just looks like an unforced error that weakens the overall product. It doesn't help that designing with text is a lot harder than many people think it is. Branding especially is a minefield.

 

Regarding the circle, the stroke is jagged. It flattens out at 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270° and there are noticeable steps everywhere along the curve. If you're working in a raster graphics program, anti-aliasing needs to be turned on so that doesn't happen. Otherwise, it's not going to look good in print either.

 

As for the text, look at how the letters in iamjanco's text on the arc aren't stretched. Each character maintains its rectangular form. They aren't wider on the outer edge than the inner edge and appearing to have a trapezoidal stretch. This is where vector tools give you more control over text on an arc. If you were working with a vector of the EHW.net logo in a vector design tool, you could have avoided stretching that as well. I wasn't being snarky about GIMP either. It's simply not the right tool for designing with text, and the same applies to Photoshop as well. Your ability to control text will be extremely limited in a raster graphics program compared to a vector one.

 

Whether ENTERPRISE cares about the integrity of the logo is up to him, but I'm saying that simply isn't done in the branding and marketing world. It opens up the door for others to modify your logo in other unapproved ways, which dilutes the strength of your logo and brand. There are a whole host of other legal issues that come with that as well, especially if trademarked, which is why I caution against doing that in-house because you don't want the first-party to encourage third-party misuse. If you look at any company's branding guidelines, you'll find a primary logo, a handful of secondary versions for specific usage scenarios, and about 35 examples of impermissible modifications that the marketing department will come down hard on you for.

[Slaughtahouse]

Impartial observations - too many cooks in the kitchen.

1. Define a RACI. E.g., Enterprise Accountable, Neurotix Responsible, other designers and/or key stakeholders consulted, and the general forum (public) informed. 
2. If you're iterating on an idea, there is no issue with quality of the product if it's just a mock-up to discuss design intent.
3. If that's the final product, yea it will definitely need some work before it's ready to print. 

Other notes: I think it's cool to have the design iterate in a forum but sometimes it can be overwhelming because everyone has an opinion. I'd recommend managing expectations by stating the status of the iteration. In other words, I think Snakecharmed's comments are valid if that were the final product. If the design shared above is for iteration and expressing intent, that level of detail / comments really aren't needed. Just distracts from the objective. You all are putting in your own free time and effort so best to encourage and support each other. 

 

If you're all unsure of what's needed, define a brief with the client / owner. 

[neurotix]

Yes, in my Coursera Graphics design course we were taught in the first week to iterate, iterate, iterate.

 

There are some things Snakecharmed pointed out that I can fix, and some that I can't. To fix the aliased circle, I could do a outer glow filter in white but with a high opacity so it's a more like a white line with a 2px blur on the outside of it.

 

I can look at some other things, but I can guarantee there's not much I can do about the EHW logo letters not being rectangular. To wrap an image around a circle without some distortion is hard. I couldn't figure out how to do it in GIMP, and as stated used a website to do a 180 degree bend. I could probably go less on the bend (like 160-170 degrees) for both and put some stars in between, too.

 

Also, in December 2022 when I first wanted to do graphic design for the site and started this thread, all we had was "Extremehw" for the forum. I pointed out putting just that on merchandise would not be great and it needed .net on the end. He said the original logo designers had disappeared and fallen off the face of the net. So for a whole month I went back and forth with him using a similar font in Linux and manually adjusting it til it mostly matched the rest. In GIMP. In about 3 1/2 weeks we settled on one he was satisfied with.

 

The point of the above paragraph is that I don't have the original font used, so I have to use my closest match one for the "Pushing it to the Limit" in this image. It had to be stretched a little bit vertically to match the height of the Extremehw logo.

 

We'll see if E likes it at since he just PMed me. If he does, I will fix what I can and itetate again.