Walkthrough of My Secular Talk Logo Contest Entry

Last month, Kyle Kulinski held a contest for a new logo for Secular Talk (an online news/political radio show on YouTube and Blog Talk Radio, of which he's the host of). The winners were announced just this past Monday and sadly, I wasn't one of them :( . But regardless of the outcome, I'm glad I participated. I got the chance to flex my creative and branding muscles, plus I got the opportunity to help out one of my favorite news/political commentators and people of all time. The only thing I regret, however, is not turning it sooner (although this wasn't completely my fault since there was no clear deadline, but I still should've turned it in earlier regardless).

When the contest first started, I said to myself that I was going to make a blog post showing people the process I went through to make my idea for what I thought the new Secular Talk logo should look like, as soon as the contest ended and the winners were announced. Well, the contest has ended and the winners have been announced, so here's my walkthrough of my Secular Talk logo contest entry! (By the way, this is my first time making a post like this. You'll be seeing more posts like these from me soon and in the future!)

The design brief from Kyle was that he wanted something simple in the form of a tribal symbol or radio wave. He wanted it to have an "ST" in the middle and he wanted to use neon green and black/white colors (which are the signature Secular Talk colors).

In his video - where he made the announcement about the logo contest - he showed us some examples of tribal symbols. I then went and drew some examples of my own. Not long after that, and as the video progressed, did I start coming up with ideas for my own rendition of the new logo. I immediately grabbed a paper towel (since that's all I had at the time). I wrote down some notes and drew some sketches, as you can see below:

After I came up with ideas, I grabbed a piece of graph paper and started making the official logo. After I was done, I scanned it into my computer (which is what you see below).

I imported the scanned drawing into Illustrator, where I then rendered it:

For my version of the logo, I took inspiration from the tribal symbols that were shown to me in Kyle's video. I turned them into an "S" and "T" fused together:

This is how the logo looks like in black with a white background:

This is how it looks like in white with a black background:

This is how it looks like in green paint (its supposed to be a neon green):

And this is how it looks like in black with a green outline:

I got the idea for creating some Secular Talk badges, which I thought would also come in handy for t-shirts and other merch. This is what I came up with:

Finally, I took the logo, infused features from Secular Talk's branding, and made a background that can function as a wallpaper, social media/web banner, and video background. The purpose of this was to show the logo in action and its capabilities:

Even though I didn't win, I'm still proud of what I did. I was really excited to take on this project because I really wanted to help one of my idols and favorite people out. I don't regret it one bit. I tried my very best. I really love how this thing came out. The only question I have now is: what do I do with it? (Lol!)