Logo design | Nithya Subramanian

Show and Tell Newsletter

Logo design, identity

I wanted to launch a newsletter that analysed images and their cultural context. Semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols, was the focus of my master's thesis, and I knew that it would be relevant, given the increasingly image-driven world we live in.

I had a great name for the newsletter: "Show and Tell". What I wanted was a logo that worked with the concept.

I thought this process would be ideal for a case study on logo design, because for once, I could read my client's mind.

I brainstormed several concepts for the logo here. I also studied the logos of other newsletters and podcasts, and noticed that many don't bother with a particularly interesting image, relying instead on their writing skills and/or name recognition. Mine, though, did need a declarative logo, not least because it was a newsletter about images.

I knew I wanted the name in the logo, so it could go out without the name in the title. That's why the concepts I chose are typographical.

I mind-mapped what the newsletter was about and the tone I wanted to achieve.

The keywords that emerged were funny and thoughtful.

It had to work on desktop and mobile, within the Substack environment, and the goal was succinct: To create a newsletter that people wanted to open.

Rendered concepts

Note: If you were a client, I wouldn't show you all these, but rather choose three that I thought worked best. This is both to save your time and to avoid you falling in love with a concept that I know will fail in implementation.

Interlinked letters to show connections

This felt like a weak concept once it was made

Light coming on at the end

A concept that just doesn't work in black and white, which is a red flag. It's also not particularly clever

Interlinked chain

Here the o and e look like they are links in a chain, showing the relationship between showing and telling

Iceberg text

This one draws on the tip-of-the-iceberg concept I sketched, and I rather liked it. But two people I showed it to said they didn't get it. That made it too clever by half

Shadow 1

Now we were getting somewhere. I liked this best, but thought it needed more pizzaz

Shadow 2

This was more legible

Showbiz letters

This is the logo I used for the launch of the newsletter. I liked the lights that made it look like a lightbulb marquee

This was the logo I ran with when I launched the newsletter. I thought the concept was great and said exactly what I wanted it to.

After a while though, the text started to seem too narrow to me. I wanted chunkier text and more symmetry.

I decided to make it lit from directly behind for central symmetry, and ensured that it was proportional in a grid. This gave me the final logo, that I also animated for the GIF at the top of this case study.

Mockup created by syifa5610, Freepik

You can read the newsletter here. If you'd like to hire me to design your logo, hit me up.

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