Dice Racing - Introducing the WRS: Crude Race animation test

[Guest darkpiranha]

 

Presenting the official league structure for the sport of Dice Racing:  The WRS, which stands for "Wide Rolled of Sports" (say it out loud and the joke will make better sense.)   Think of the WRS as the "FIFA" of Dice Racing.  It's the governing body that came in and purchased and unified all the various leagues, organizations, tournaments, and otherwise chaotic elements of the sport that had existed for a long time.  

 

(More detail about the league and design concepts.)

Spoiler

 

Under the WRS umbrella will be what are called "Kingdoms", which roughly translate to continents, which are made up of "Houses", which translate to nations, which are then made up of individual clubs.  These Houses all feed the two main racing leagues (think the old AFL/NFL, or NHL/WHA rival leagues that were brought under one roof), as well as send the clubs to various tournaments.   Kingdoms will eventually have their own distinct crest style, as will Houses.  

 

Here's the first draft at what the overall Federation logo will look like.  The HEX shape is going to be a dominant element in all Dice Racing iconography, as it has six sides, like dice have, plus the number six is used fractally, in that if anything is further subdivided (such as a Minor House), it will always be into six elements.  Six Kingdoms, made up of six Houses each, made up of six Minor Houses each, etc).  

 

 

Any and all C&C is welcome, as this project is primarily to force me to master all of the graphic design tools at my disposal.  My day job is a video producer, so almost all of my regular design work comes in that form, rather than pure logo or graphic design.  I especially want to master Illustrator, as my current level of experience is basically very rough and crude manipulation to prepare graphics for animation or other video work.  

[NoE38_Concepts]

Nice job on the logos!

This is my kind of thing. I use dice a lot for determining results in my fictional leagues.

[Guest darkpiranha]

 

Next up, I haven't been able to nail down a font choice for the wordmark and general league graphics.  I want something that looks solidly corporate, but still with a side of fun.  I also want it to pull in some of the feel of dice, either from a square aesthetic, or a hexagonal aesthetic, or even dots.

 

I've included two of the potential federation logos for comparison.

 

My four favorites are on top, with the lower left being other traditional-ish looks (looking at them again, the one on the bottom left should probably be in the top four), while the ones on the lower right are a bit too far out there to be the league wordmark. Most of these will also be in play for the various Kingdom and House subdivisions of the overall federation.  

 

All C&C welcome.  Of the top four and bottom left, any of those strike your fancy?  

[NoE38_Concepts]

I like the second logo and the third font at the top.

[Thazer]

I'm still confused over some elements of the league concept, but its well within the "whoa :censored:, this is gonna be unique and epic!" spectrum.

 

with the fonts id be concerned about the readability of the letter D, and balancing that with how boxy you you'd prefer the font.

Context solves the issue after a moment, but 'wide rolleo' isn't a great first look.

 

imho, the actual dice clashes with the overall logo because it isn't stylized as much. in all examples its vectorized naturalistic dice on top of on a hyperstylized logo.

maybe you can indicate dice without it being so......plain? does it have to be white, do the dots have to be circles, am i complicating this too much...

 

also i wonder about the significance of the top numbers of the dice in all versions. its borderline distracting but probably unavoidable. maybe you can even make that aspect work for you.

 

...rock on! 

 

[sparkychewbarky]

Hi darkp...

I agree with Commodore..."This is gonna be unique and epic".

 

I like the first logo with the big dice at the bottom.

I don't think you need the two smaller ones at the top.

I like the 3rd font...

Perhaps the square within the "O"s could be a dot (to resemble a dice)

 

Nice work darkp...really looking forward to this series.

[Guest darkpiranha]

16 hours ago, Commodore Crablegs said:

I'm still confused over some elements of the league concept, but its well within the "whoa :censored:, this is gonna be unique and epic!" spectrum.

 

with the fonts id be concerned about the readability of the letter D, and balancing that with how boxy you you'd prefer the font.

Context solves the issue after a moment, but 'wide rolleo' isn't a great first look.

 

imho, the actual dice clashes with the overall logo because it isn't stylized as much. in all examples its vectorized naturalistic dice on top of on a hyperstylized logo.

maybe you can indicate dice without it being so......plain? does it have to be white, do the dots have to be circles, am i complicating this too much...

 

also i wonder about the significance of the top numbers of the dice in all versions. its borderline distracting but probably unavoidable. maybe you can even make that aspect work for you.

 

...rock on! 

 

 

lol.  In a case study of being 'too close to see the flaws', it never once occurred to me that it looked like Rolleo.  It does indeed look exactly like that.  Yes, context fixes it, but now it'll nag at me to where I must come up with an alternate solution.  It might be as simple as for the official logo, modifying the D's to where it's more distinctly angled on the right.  Relying on context will be fine for using it in situations as just a font (where I can't easily modify it).  

 

The use of the dice themselves in the logo is something I've wrestled with.  The reason FOR using dice that look like plain old dice is that that's what is actually used (plain white dice are the "official" dice used).  In branding terms, it would be similar to paying tribute to the history and heritage of the sport by putting it in the logo.   However, I totally agree with you that it does clash.  I'm going to play around with stylizing the dice, but I'm not sure how much styling they can take before they end up not looking like dice.  In general, the pips on the dice, specifically the numbers 1-6 are hugely iconic in the history of this league and within the sport itself.  It would be like a football league logo without any reference to a football.  However, without doing something like the top right logo example, with all six faces of the dice represented, it makes one wonder what the significance of any particular number being shown is, such as the big six on the left logo.  

 

My in-world concept for the number used on the die would be that in each usage of the logo, it would be able to change, randomly.  For example, in the network broadcasts of any WRS games, it would be an expected thing to see the die animated to show a new number periodically.  For static printed logos, perhaps there would be some sort of algorithm at the printer to where it would randomly use one of the six different versions of the logo to place on a letterhead or business card or sports card.  Each fan would likely have their own favorite number and choose to express that fandom through that number, not unlike nationalistic pride.  The randomness of a D6 would be paramount in the mindset of fans.

 

While tradition is super-important in this league, the in-world concept is that about seven seasons ago, the WRS came in and purchased all the independent Dice Racing leagues, races and tournaments, and unified them under one umbrella, like FIFA did with soccer, so now might be the perfect time to break with tradition and do something new and hyperstylized across the board.

 

I'll be playing with this over the coming days.

 

Here is a nerdy (meaning longer) explanation of this Dice League hidden below.

Spoiler

 

While most people use dice to simulate their baseball or football or hockey leagues, my game is a bit more meta than that.  In my league the game itself is just rolling the dice and counting which number "won".  It's infinitely more involved  The basic unit/game of Dice Racing is six dice (54 of them) being rolled up to six at a time, and being placed on a board/track where they 'race' to see which one ends up with the most at the end of the 54 dice.  Each number (1-6) has a team associated with it for that race, so if six wins with a total of 14 dice in that race, then the team associated with that number, say, the Deadskins, gets credit for whatever that result means.  

 

Sometimes that result is just that they win the race.  Yay!  Here's your ribbon for winning the New York Invitational.  Put it on your trophy shelf.

 

But the real meat of Dice Racing is the league structure.  A season of Dice Racing consists of ten races/games.  Six teams, each associated with a particular number (1-6) for the entire season.  Ten races of 54 dice.  I have a win/loss/tie/first-place results thing set up.  Two points for a win, one for a tie, 1 bonus if you come in first (or tie for first).  A win is getting to 10 dice in one race, which is not always easy to do.  I ultimately settled on 54 dice because a six-way tie would be 9 dice each.  So only getting to nine gives you one point in the standings.  A typical winning score in a race is about 13.

 

Ten races for a season.  A typical point total for a first-place team is about 14 points.  

 

The top two teams compete in the League Championship, a winner take all race using 54 dice (only the dice associated with the two competitors are counted).  

 

A typical league has three Divisions, A, B, and C.  The A Division is the one that competes for the League Championship.  All three Divisions feature promotion and relegation, like in world soccer. Bottom two teams in A and B get relegated down to B and C, respectively, while the top two teams from B and C move up to A and B.  In Division C, the bottom THREE teams get relegated out of the league (known as Exile in in-world terms).  Divisions B and C do not have any additional games to determine who goes up the ladder, it's just the top two teams.  

 

Within the world of this game, there are two major leagues that were brought together, not unlike baseball's American and National Leagues, or football's NFL and AFL.  So these two leagues are self-contained for the most part.  After the League Champions are determined, both of those teams compete in the ultimate championship, The Super Roll. (dice puns are everywhere in this league).   A further post-season event is contested (considered less prestigious than the Super Roll) where the six division winners (A,B,C, in two leagues) compete in a series of single elimination races (last-place being dropped from the next race) called The Rolled Series.

 

The first event on the league calendar every season is the grand race that's used to determine the six teams  (three in each league) who will replace the three that were relegated/exiled out the previous season.  This is the Roll Call tournament.  It's a combination of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, and soccer's FA Cups, where basically EVERY team (that's not currently in one of the two major leagues) gets a chance to participate in a tournament that starts off with nearly a thousand teams, and whittles it down to the six that win and get selected to fill the open slots.

 

 

And here's an explanation of why I am doing this sort of league instead of simulating a hockey or football league (which I've done in the past)

Spoiler

 

I've done lots of simulation leagues, mostly hockey, with all the teams and players and logos and history you'd come to expect.  However, there was a game I created back in high school (30 years ago, now) where I started tabulating the results of a giant pile of dice I'd roll while waiting for my turn in a role-playing game (the game used as many as sixty dice on one person's turn).  This quickly evolved into teams, and rules, and stats and eventually (over about five months) it became the Dice Racing League.  It followed the NFL's format of sixteen games, with the season-ending Super Roll.  I probably did a hundred of these types of seasons.  They were quick and easy to do a season, usually in one evening.   

 

Then college started and I got really busy and Dice Racing went by the wayside.  But then I had a couple of semesters with a lighter workload, and (this was pre-internet era) lots more free time, so I pulled the old Dice Racing out, and for the first time used a computer to help with the records-keeping (using an old Atari 800).  For the first time, I also dabbled in graphic design, creating a special board/track just for use with the game.  I did many seasons of this and then this too went by the wayside as graduation and real work emerged.  Plus, I discovered Wayne Gretzky Hockey League Simulator.  Many, many, many hours and days spent with that program, as I'm sure everyone reading this has a similar story about the first league simulation program they discovered.  But that too went by the wayside.  

 

Flash forward about fifteen years, and I'm showing my ten-year old son a lot of my old role playing game stuff, and with all of that are my notebooks and printouts of all my old Dice Racing, and hockey league simulations.  So that kicked off a new round of playing the Dice Racing game with him, and just reminiscing about all of it and remembering the "big games" and legendary teams.  By this time, I had also become relatively familiar with Excel, so I dove right it to creating everything within a spreadsheet, with all the scores and stats being automatically calculated and recorded.  I was also more heavily into graphic design at this point, so I had fun dabbling in creating logos for all these teams.  The search for cool logos and tips on logo design is what led me here, to these forums, more than ten years ago, now.   I did a few seasons of that before getting distracted again.  

 

Then in 2013, I discovered Google Sheets, which is Google's spreadsheet program.  As a sample test, I uploaded one of my older Excel Dice Racing spreadsheets to it just to see how it translated, and sure enough, it worked.  That was all it took.  I got re-nostalgic for those teams and the fun of the league, and then dove headfirst into really mastering Google Sheets, using the Dice Racing as my testing grounds.   One thing that Google Sheets has facilitated is allowing the league to expand as big as it wants to be.  This has enabled me to include ALL of the various fantasy football leagues I've run, sports simulations, as well as every real sport in the world, fake teams from movies and TV, and hundreds of cool teams I've discovered here on these boards, along with really any idea that comes to mind that would make an interesting or disruptive 'team'.

 

It's still definitely a work in progress, but I finally have the ultimate Dice Racing spreadsheet created.  It's MASSIVE.  It can handle thousands of teams, each with their own logo and career stats.   The one thing that's always been missing is a true design and branding for the league.

 

 

And from a graphic design sense, here's why I've chosen this project to be the one I focus on indefinitely.

Spoiler

 

So that's where all this finally comes in.  I've had all of this stuff in my head for 30 years, and now I want to make all of it a 'reality'.  This coincides with my desire to finally master several different creative programs.  I'm a video producer, and I have long since mastered Adobe Premiere and After Effects, and am very proficient with Photoshop.  I know how to use Illustrator, but I don't need to use it that often, so my skill set is extremely limited and I have to re-learn it each time I use it.   Diving head-first into fully fleshing out this Dice Racing League will allow me to really learn Illustrator, as I want to get super-meticulous in creating all the league logos and begin re-creating team logos.  I plan on creating 'gear' and uniforms for the dice that are racing, such as helmets, shoes, banners, etc. and creating cool branding templates like everyone does with all the other sports.  I love the recent trend of creating full stadiums using a program like SketchUp, and for Dice Racing, I want to create some of the in-world's iconic tracks, like auto racing's Daytona or Indianapolis Motor Speedway, or horse racing's Churchill Downs.  If that goes well, I'll start creating individual teams' tracks.  

 

Stepping over to video, I want to master a 3D program, such as Cinema 4D, which I use with Adobe After Effects.  With this, I want to create full 3D versions of the dice that race, with their helmets and whatever other gear is created, and then to import the tracks from SketchUp to ultimately do full 3D animations of some of the races, or using a race metaphor to show a season or races.  All of this would be animated with camera angles, on-screen network graphics, possibly even announcers.  Each one of these animations would last about 30 seconds or a minute.  

 

Because I have 30 years worth of history for this league, with historical data and vintage media (the original notebooks I used), I want to explore presenting all of this in multimedia formats.  I've always loved Ken Burns' Baseball series he did on PBS, and I'd love to create a 10 or 15 minute 'documentary' detailing the in-world history of Dice Racing, starting with this vintage games in the beginning.  I'd create 'old film' looking animations of some of the original dice races to use along with images from the notebooks, all done in that Ken Burns style.  Since there are many distinct eras of the game's development history, it dovetails nicely into the same sorts of eras like with regular sports, from the vintage to the mid-century renaissance, to the hard times and competition from rival leagues, to the modern mega-successful game.  There are many legacies of teams that stretch back all the way to the very first races, to brand new teams with no legacy, all competing on an equal stage.

 

In addition to this documentary, I love the yearbooks created by some of the forum members, such as the NCFA guides.  I want to really dive into Adobe In-Design to learn how to put a super-slick publication together and then actually print out a copy of it.  This coffee table style book would span the entire history of the league and feature cool profile pages of the league's greatest twenty or thirty teams as part of it.  Plus, a detailed records/statistics section in the back.  I want this book to be as meticulously crafted and ridiculously detailed as any real book you'd find on a real sport.

 

Finally, as this started out as a 'game' I'd play, and continues to remain so, I want to create a really beautiful, real-world edition of this game as if it was a boardgame you could purchase on the shelves.  I'm a boardgame fan and amateur designer, so this is also right up my alley.  I'd love to 3D print as many of the teams as I create 3d models for.  I want to create a nice wooden track/board that has a way to use a smartphone as the digital scoreboard.  I want to upload my track designs to a custom mousepad printing site and have the playing surface be interchangable based on teams or if it's supposed to simulate one of the classic tracks.   I'd want to do a portable, box edition of the game (with all the attendant graphics and design) as well as the Deluxe edition made out of wood.  

 

Oh, and I want to create trading cards.  Using frame grabs from the race animations, it should be relatively simple to create a full set of cards for the major teams in the league, including stats on the back.  I've used Adobe In-Design and Google Sheets to create cards for some board games I've created, so I know it's simple enough to automate creating a full league's worth of cards assuming you have your data and images formatted correctly.  

 

There's probably more cool stuff I will discover on the way, but this Dice Racing League project gives me the opportunity to really create something that scratches all of my sports and creative itches.  Sure, it's just rolling dice and counting them, but that's all ALL sports are, ultimately, is accumulating data and then breaking those stats down and applying context to them which leads to stories and histories and legacies and on and on.   It's not just that the Lupos are the team associated with the number six in this race and that they rolled 19 and won the race. It's that 19 is a number that had never been reached before, much less by a team playing in its first season.  Is this the start of a new record-breaking career?  Or will this team break the record and then just as quickly fade into oblivion?    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I fully realize that not a single other soul will likely be interested in any of these explanations or the history or the results and stats, but this is ultimately only for me, and a fun way for me to force myself to learn how to increase my graphic design/3D animation/programming skills so I can be better in my real-world video production career.  

 

 

 

 

[Niiklaz]

I love the depth and thought you put in to this, it´s what makes a fictional league great imo. Really looking forward to see how this goes.
I also learned to use excel/google sheets just to do these kind of projects, they´re great

[Guest darkpiranha]

 

Not a major update. Just playing around with some more logo ideas.  A couple are from before, just there for comparison's sake.  Not having much inspiration yet for doing something radical with the dice.  Dice are what they are.  If I do any sort of extreme angle or deformity, it loses it's hex shape, which is important to me to retain. Changing the shape of the pips to squares or hexagons or stars doesn't do enough to change it.  The two center ones interest me the most.  I like how the top one has all the faces of the die represented, however, I might try taking away the shading on the center bottom die, and possibly making that central blank face a solid white, or transparent.  

 

Anyway, thanks for everyone's C&C so far.  Please keep it coming!

 

 

[Thazer]

with the dice..instead of concentrating on the form, you could play with negative/positive space

something as basic as this explores what i meant:

 

as for the latest set, bottom left [4] is actually what pops for me. the rest are more busy so that one pops through. maybe imply a dice with the red part.

top right [3] in close second. id try the dots on the dice white-ish to open some breathing room and balance the whole thing.

 

btw i know you really want obvious dice there, but consider that many league logos heavily stylize or barely emphasize the main 'doohickey'

 

ufc = no fists, no fighters, octagon

nhl = no stick or puck

nfl = stylized football

nba = silhouette no grooves

mlb = silhouette no stitches

 

anyways one last thingy, are the letters in the logo a custom 3 letter font you developed for it?

would you develop the full font set if that's the case?

 

im just throwing stuff out there to consider!

[Guest darkpiranha]

14 hours ago, Commodore Crablegs said:

as for the latest set, bottom left [4] is actually what pops for me. the rest are more busy so that one pops through. maybe imply a dice with the red part.

top right [3] in close second. id try the dots on the dice white-ish to open some breathing room and balance the whole thing.

 

btw i know you really want obvious dice there, but consider that many league logos heavily stylize or barely emphasize the main 'doohickey'

 

anyways one last thingy, are the letters in the logo a custom 3 letter font you developed for it?

would you develop the full font set if that's the case?

 

im just throwing stuff out there to consider!

 

Thanks.  It's not a font I created, but something I found on Thinkstock on a business card.  They did the whole alphabet (I think), but it's not something I'd ever consider using as a font or as anything other than an abstract logo. 

 

And I totally agree about stylizing the doohickey or not even needing it, but for most of the examples you cited, those are established sports where simply the name of the league tells you all you need to know about it.  In this case, while in-world, Dice Racing has existed for decades, in the real world, no one knows what it is, so there will need to be something in the logo indicating what the sport's doohickey even is.   The UFC has a doohickey-less logo now, but their original logo did indeed spell things out for the uninitiated!  

 

If I was ultimately creating a REAL real logo for an actual league that needed to exist in the real world, then I'd do a lot more to eliminate the literalness of the dice in the logo, but for my own purposes, the logo will likely end up using the dice dots in some capacity.   I've got a new logo page going up in a bit that maybe has some ideas that are more organic and less busy.

 

 

[Guest darkpiranha]

 

Here's a new batch of logos.  I think I'm homing in on the center top one as my personal favorite so far.  It's got all the elements I want, plus it's relatively clean.  Making the dots white and putting them in numerical order helps out.  Putting the 1 and 2 on the top makes that area less cluttered than the original idea for this version (lower right logo) that had the 5 and 6 on top.  

 

 

[Guest darkpiranha]

 

As I go back through my older Dice Racing stuff, I will be collecting vintage stuff and making it presentable.  Here are some older DRL logos I found along with the second track I created, back in 2003.  I printed this out and placed it under a paper-sized piece of clear plexiglass, along with a strip of paper that had the logos for the teams competing lined up with their number.  The first track I made was back in 1987, but I doubt that still exists.  That was pre-computer graphic design days, and was hand-made and hand-drawn.  At some point I'll do my best to recreate it for archival purposes.

 

 

[Guest darkpiranha]

 

Here's a few more updated versions of the wordmark/font.  I can see using the top font for just the logo, and the bottom font for subheadings or more general league text.

 

The main thing I did with the font on top is to make the D's both have angled sides to them.  Because of the angle of the R, it doesn't jump out at me that it's been modified.  

 

And for fun, on the second one, I changed out the square dot on the actual font with some regular dice dots.  It's fun, but it might be a step too far.  If this was just a board game, I'd probably be happy to put the dots in there.

 

[sparkychewbarky]

One big dot in each of the "O"'s (rather than the black square) might do the trick, dp.

[Guest darkpiranha]

26 minutes ago, sparky chewbarky said:

One big dot in each of the "O"'s (rather than the black square) might do the trick, dp.

 

Would you put one in the D's as well?

[sparkychewbarky]

Just now, darkpiranha said:

 

Would you put one in the D's as well?

 

I don't think so dp...because the "D"'s aren't shaped like a dice.

[Guest darkpiranha]

 

Okay.  For now, this is the logo I'm going to go with.  Thanks for all the feedback. Keep it coming.  It's by no means set in stone.  

 

I'm really happy with the straight B&W version.  I wasn't expecting this logo to work in B&W.  It looks pretty clear even shrunk way down. The greyscale ones still need some work, but I like the lower of the two more.  

 

One thing I haven't decided upon yet is if the colors of the logo are going to be locked in, or if it's going to be allowed to be different color combos as the situation calls for.  

 

Okay.  I'll theoretically be taking a couple of days off from creating anything.  I'm knee deep in the finer points of learning Cinema 4D.  

 

What I've learned so far:  

Not really learned, but just had reconfirmed again ten times over.  For anyone wanting to learn Photoshop or Illustrator or really any program, it goes without saying that you should lock yourself into a project that calls for you to do things about your current skill level.  It's fun to just watch tutorials and learn the generic stuff about these programs, but when you have something specific you're needing to accomplish, it forces you to have to troubleshoot problems and learn the finer, necessary points of the program you otherwise would just ignore.  

[Guest darkpiranha]

I had two goals for this first animation test.  

 

(1) Is it possible to use existing race data (taken from the master Google Spreadsheet I use) and figure out how to make After Effects automatically read that data and translate it into something resembling a race?

 

(2) How easy is it to make an animated GIF and upload it/embed it?

 

 

The answers to both questions was an exciting success.  I'd never attempted to make an animated GIF before, so that was fun.  Looked pretty simple to do, and it was.  

 

For the animation itself, though, it turned out better and easier than I expected.  Please keep in mind that this in no way represents what it will ultimately look like.  The final result will be a fully 3D environment, with each of the dice looking something like the dice-helmet graphic I posted a few days ago. 

There will also be network graphics, stats, sound effects, etc.  I have some really elaborate stuff planned for it.  

 

The cool thing is that it IS possible to translate the data, create an accurate race, and have those points of data remain accurate with a 3D camera move put on it.

 

 

For those that have been following along, the below text explains what you're actually looking at.

Spoiler

 

The result that's been simulated in that animation is actually a full ten-game season.  Each black number you see on the top/right indicates the number of league points earned.  It follows similar to hockey and soccer, with two points for a win (a game score ten or above), one point for a tie (a game score of exactly 9) and a bonus point for coming in first or tied for first.  So each game a team earns from zero to three points.  In this example, the Lake Show started off strong, but faded quickly.  The Groundhogs (the alarm clock with Bill Murray's face in it) got a slow start, but then was a steady points-earner through the majority of the season.  The I*Rons didn't get it's first points (game score 9 or above) until game nine of ten.  

 

So the Groundhogs won the season with total points of 16, while the Emerald Birds and Gordon Gartrell DT finished tied for second at 13.

 

When I ultimately produce these race animations, they'll last around 45 seconds or so, with after each race/game, the racers will pause while there will be a quick breakdown of the stats for that game before jumping to the results of the next game.  So it'll be a more staggered presentation.  At the end of the race, there will be a standings-type graphic overlay the screen showing all the relevant stats for the season.

 

Fun! (for me, at least)

 

 

 

 

 

[sparkychewbarky]

On April 22, 2016 at 8:14 PM, darkpiranha said:

 

Okay.  For now, this is the logo I'm going to go with.  Thanks for all the feedback. Keep it coming.  It's by no means set in stone.  

 

I'm really happy with the straight B&W version.  I wasn't expecting this logo to work in B&W.  It looks pretty clear even shrunk way down. The greyscale ones still need some work, but I like the lower of the two more.  

 

One thing I haven't decided upon yet is if the colors of the logo are going to be locked in, or if it's going to be allowed to be different color combos as the situation calls for.  

 

Okay.  I'll theoretically be taking a couple of days off from creating anything.  I'm knee deep in the finer points of learning Cinema 4D.  

 

What I've learned so far:  

Not really learned, but just had reconfirmed again ten times over.  For anyone wanting to learn Photoshop or Illustrator or really any program, it goes without saying that you should lock yourself into a project that calls for you to do things about your current skill level.  It's fun to just watch tutorials and learn the generic stuff about these programs, but when you have something specific you're needing to accomplish, it forces you to have to troubleshoot problems and learn the finer, necessary points of the program you otherwise would just ignore.  

 

This exactly...I taught myself PS and AI by doing what you're doing here...creating projects that force you to learn the how's and why's

of achieving an end result.

It becomes a design and a "mechanical" challenge.

You've created a fascinating project for yourself dp.

The content looks great so far.

The logo works really well.