I was always very fond of knives - I always carry a pocket-knife and as I use a lot of time in the kitchen I daily use good kitchen-knives. A while ago two of my medium size kitchen knives disappeared... (yes, I know, and I haven't got any idea where they are), and I began thinking about having some new ones. And why not have them made, instead of buying boring standard knives?

So one evening I talked to @evilhippie, the best blacksmith on Steemit, and we agreed to try to make a knife together. After a lot of sketches we decided on a knife that was inspired by the Scandinavian Iron-age.

An early sketch for the knife. The original pencil sketch is lost I am afraid.

Go see Evil Hippies post about how he made the knife!

So after the knife was made in steel, @evilhippie asked me if I could make a logo for it and of course I agreed. We are calling it Madsted Kniven (the Madsted Knife) after the small village where it was conceived, so that was the letters I had to use.

As the design was inspired by the ancient Danes - I decided to draw the letters as rune, or something close. I adopted the upper and lower lines that can be seen on rune stones, and let the upper and lower horizontal lines of the E disappear in the general lines.

I wasn't too concerned with readability in this project. I like that the letters at first seem a bit unfamiliar, as if they were real runes and that it is first after a second the brain decodes the letters.

I have worked a lot with letters and no longer use premade fonts. I simply draw, and then I tweak it in a vector program ( I use the open source program Inkscape.) As you can see I haven't gone through all the detail yet. I plan to make the letters in the second line equally thick as they are in the upper line for example.

The simple letter logo

As the first letter, instead of the letter M I used the rune that @evilhippie uses as his trademark and stamps into all his blades. It is the rune Mannaz in @evilhippies own design.

After the letters I added two ravens that I had already designed. They are there as an allusion to the Norse God Odin who was probably also worshipped in the late Iron-age.

The finished logo

I also made a design for the box as @evilhippie had orders for knives that was to be used as Christmas-presents.

The design for the box.

Making logos, monograms and exlibris has been a fun and lucrative business for me, but normally I never publish them as they belongs to the customers. But this logo was for a project that I participated in so finally I can show some of my works in that field too.

And... remember to go see how the knives was made :)