The Face of BodyMonkey
20 Feb
A new business I’m getting ready to launch called BodyMonkey.com is starting to take shape, and one of the gimmicks is having a monkey as the logo.
I’ve ignored the stylistic part of the design thus far because the backend functions and whatnot are much more important. As most of that stuff nears completion, I’ve had to get my creative side going and get a logo done.
Unfortunately if it were up to me to draw a “Cool, badass monkey with a heart of gold” it would at best look like:
….yea….so I’ve been searching around for an artist. The hard part is describing what I see in my head onto paper…partly because I don’t even know what I want “The Monkey” to look like. So one night out Downtown I saw a guy doing portraits for people at a bar. Got his card, called him up, and met him Downtown again a few days later, but this time with a binder full of monkey pictures.
In the dark bar on a Monday night I tried describing to him what BodyMonkey was and what I wanted…..since I hardly knew what I wanted, I let him go ahead and do his thing. With his headlamp on for light, here’s the first drawing:
I didn’t like it. I thought it looked kinda scary. I also thought it was way too “Monkeyish.” I want the character to be a monkey, but not a realistic looking monkey.
My lack of direction was apparent. I further told him that The Monkey would be in different situations on different pages of the website. In the Breakdancing Video section The Monkey will be in funky clothes bustin’ a move. In the Barware section The Monkey will be dressed in a suave tuxedo drinking a martini. In the Magic section The Monkey will be pulling a rabbit out of a hat and so forth……
So the next drawing came out like this:
Not bad! Since these were very, very rough drafts, this was a great start. After some fine tuning, adding more personality traits, coloring and Photoshopping, this picture will look like a finished character ready to post on the site.
The hardest part is getting the character down, after that it’s easy for the artist to re-render The Monkey in different locations and situations. Then after Photoshopping you can make The Monkey look like anything!
One small step closer to getting BodyMonkey completed!
Oooh, he did a pretty nice job for the second try and little direction. Can’t wait to see the finished product!
Damn you nev, where do you find these drop-shippers?!
Looking good Nev! But why is it taking so long to set up the site? Shouldn’t the programming be quite similar to HOR and pretty simple to implement, i.e. standard ecommerce features? Where did you hire your programmers from? Good luck with everything!
Alan,
BodyMonkey is on a Yahoo Store platform which uses its own proprietary language called RTML which requires a very specialized programmer.
It’s taking so long partially from slacking and partially there are just so many new things I need to learn about this new system.
Will be done soon though!
-Nev
Nev, When do you think you will buy a house? Sorry if you posted about this before but I am a new reader. Thanks.
Neville,
Check out elance.com for your logo design. There are alot of artists that can do pretty nice work for a fair price. It’s an auction so you can pick the winner.
hey Nev,
Your house of raves is an interesting site. I have a friend running a company with some products you might like dealing with lights – try maxsainnovations.com
they have a changing light globe that fits house of rave like a glove. cheers