Imaginary Monsters identity redesign

I've been rocking the Imaginary Monsters name since my last days at college. What grew out of the final project I did at school became my future business name and brand. I finished up at RIT in 2005 and the logotype I made for Imaginary Monsters has been left relatively unchanged for nearly five years (apart from a few new color options). It has served me well, but over the past year I've been taking stock in where I am right now as an artist and as a designer, as well as trying out new work methods to try and see what the future of my work will be. I decided that my work has changed enough over the past 4.5 years that I should update the look of my Imaginary Monsters brand to better represent who I am to colleagues, allies, and future clients. So, I think I have it mostly situated: At the top is the original Imaginary Monsters logotype, born 2005. Below it are some crazy color iterations and the less elements black and white version. Now that I can see this I feel like this is what I wanted the I.M. look to be from the get go. I still liked parts of the original mark and the type I designed for it, so I decided to keep the top "Imaginary" section. This sort of represents where I'm coming from: most of my old work was very clean edged and vector heavy. Precise and accurate, but a little sterile.

The bottom type is a totally new addition. The bulbous, fleshy, gory, booger puke type is organic and sticky. This portion of type was hand rendered and it's much closer to what I've been doing with things like Eat World lately. Something more violent and aggressive is going on, but it's an energy I'm excited to have access to and continue working with.

I hope this new mark helps to excite more people about my work rather than disturb them. It unsettles me a bit, but I'm ready to embrace that uncertainty. Life and work are getting more exciting by the day, so let's adventure together! Ha!

If you have any comments about the mark definitely let me know! Thank you world.

Here's another rationale note too:
The new Imaginary Monsters logotype also represents what I was interested as a young boy and continue to gravitate towards now. It's deliberately modeled to look like a gross out horror toy brand from the 80s you somehow missed when growing up. The 80s were such a weird time when gross was cool and monsters were everywhere in Saturday morning television, toy stores, and cereal boxes. If it involved mutants, barbarians, ghosts and ghost busters, robots, or just plain monsters it was damn cool!

Now I'm ready for the renaissance.

Hand Lettering: Type Silhouettes

I went over to RIT yesterday to hang out with their Hand Lettering club and give a demo. We talked about screen printing and some of the tools I use for doing ink work. The night before I put together these two initial caps based off of typographic silhouettes. The first one is a majuscule Helvetica P.

And the second one is a majuscule Bodoni Z, negative space.

I love the word "majuscule". For the Helvetica P I used a crow quill pen (Speedball/Hunt 102 nib). For the Bodoni Z I used my Kuretake pen (a brush and ink would have done just fine too).

I enjoyed doing those...much different than other hand lettering I've done recently, like exploding brain typography in this Angry Penguin poster:

I should have some more booger and brain type for you soon though, so stay tuned.