Making the new Piccalilli logo

24th January 2020 — 3 minute read

The initial logo for Piccalilli was rushed together in about 10 minutes in illustrator and let’s be honest, it was shit.

The old logo which is a yellow and red jar with “Piccalilli” written next to it

I hated it pretty much from day one, but wanted to focus on making the newsletter, so just dealt with it. It has been a long running todo of mine to “sort it” though.

One thing that was an absolute priority for this overhaul of Piccalilli was getting a really solid brand in place. I wanted to do it properly too, so I grabbed a trusty Field Notes and started drawing.

Initially I came up with some crap concepts of cute vegetable characters that happen to be ingredients of piccalilli.

A two page spread in my notebook has two awful drawings of peppers

I wasn’t digging them at all, mainly because I am awful at drawing. I focused instead on the spiciness of piccalilli itself (you can really go to town on the mustard and chillis and make a super tasty and spicy piccalilli) and that brought so many more creative ideas.

So, I got back to the sketch book and concentrated on two parts: spiciness and badges (or even food labels).

A group of concepts that go from rough sketches, to vector scamps, all the way to the finished product

As you can see, all of the concepts were similar and the evolution was pretty dramatic. I really put this down to staying in my notebook for as long as possible and I really recommend this video by Aaron Draplin on his process, because it’s what is lodged in my head now during the rare opportunities I get to do this sort of design.

After all of the work and thinking, here’s the final product:

The Piccalilli logo, which is a badge with “Piccalilli - Dang Spicy Tutorials” written around the edges with a red chilli in the middle

I’m pretty darn proud of it. Branding and logo design really isn’t my strength as a designer, so I find it very hard. I’m so happy that I persevered with this one though because I feel like it’s improved my skills and confidence as a designer.

This approach of chillies and badges is giving me loads of creative freedom, because there’s a lush colour palette there and I can utilise spiciness to describe tutorial/course difficulty levels (amongst other things). That font is to die for too.

Wrapping up permalink

This is just a short post about the logo specifically because I thought someone might find the process useful. Go and read about why this has all started and then sign up for updates 🚀

Hi 👋, I’m Andy — an educator and web designer

I produce front-end development tutorials over at Front-End Challenges Club and Piccalilli. You can sign up for updates on Piccalilli to stay up to date with its progress.