Voices from the Mountains Radio, Logo Design Contest

My VFM radio logo design

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In case you are not aware, there is a great radio program—Voices from the Mountains—that happens on Fridays, 9:00 pm MDT (Saturdays at 3:00 am UTC) that is hosted by some members of the Rocky Mountain Steemit community. It is a great show that combines music, talk, and comedy, all while showcasing the creative works of Steemians in the Rocky Mountain region.

@lpfaust, one of the show's hosts, recently sent out a call to artists to help them design a vector graphic logo for their show. I have a lot of experience with traditional artistic mediums, but, to be honest, digital art is still pretty new to me and my experience is pretty limited and I thought this would be a great way to get some more practice.

Before this project I had tried to work with adobe illustrator a couple times in the past, just jumping into things. I quickly learned that it worked quite differently than other programs that I was familiar with and never really went any further, intending to return to it at a later time. For this piece, I initially decided to create the full image in Autodesk Sketchbook, which I am more familiar with, and then convert it to a scalable image. That didn’t work so well. I had no trouble creating the image in Autodesk Sketchbook, but the color conversion in Illustrator was streaky and not up to par.

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My Autodesk Sketchbook version pre-conversion (I didn’t save a copy of the crappy conversion)

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So, I decided to take a crash course in Illustrator. I figured there had to be a way I could at least keep my line work for the illustrator file. It turned out the image trace feature was what I was looking for. I loaded up my sketchbook file and removed all the color and shadow. I then opened it in Illustrator and used the trace and expand features to break it into objects that could be filled, colored and manipulated.

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My Adobe Illustrator trace

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It took watching a few tutorials and reading through some documentation to learn the lingo and get acquainted with illustrator. Even then I hit a few hang-ups. But, overall Illustrator really wasn’t as hard to use as it was to get used to. I learned quite a bit working on this logo and will likely use illustrator again in the future. It may not be ideal for fine art, but for illustrations, cartoons, and logos it is easy to see how it would make things go very quickly.

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Montana State flag

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The logo I designed was inspired by the state seal and flag of Montana (my home state). It consists of an encircled mountain landscape with a banner laying over the bottom of it. The name of the show is written around the circle, with the letters V, F and M (the abbreviated form of the show) accentuated with red. On the banner, “MSP-WAVES RADIO” is displayed.

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Be sure and check out the show Friday night/Saturday morning (0300 UTC) on MSP-WAVES radio on the P.A.L. discord channel.

Also, if you live in the Rocky Mountain region and would like to connect to with other steemians in the area, check out the Rocky Mountain Steemit discord channel.

Thanks for looking. I hope you enjoyed!

Best wishes,
@veckinon