A helmet, a crack, one red. Built from a single line in the brief.

One sentence to start from.

The whole brief was a line: a minimalistic front-facing motorcycle helmet with a cracked visor. Around it, a feel (dark, mysterious, bold) and an avoid list (no pink, no bright colours, no Comic Sans or Arial, nothing overtly feminine).

The mind map turned that into an idea. A helmet hides the rider, a crack means impact. A hidden face that has been broken, in black with one blood red.

What I looked at.

Front-view racing helmets, because the front view hides the rider. Rider emblems, because the mark should work as a patch. Gothic display type with sharp edges that still read small. And a strict palette: black for the mystery, one deep red for the crack.

Three thumbnails in pencil before going digital.

A side view, a front view and a crest. Pencil first, so the shapes are decided before any tool gets involved.

From side view to front view.

The first draft read the helmet in profile. The client's note was clear: a front-facing helmet with a crack on the visor. So the mark was rebuilt face-on, the visor became the centre of the logo and the crack moved onto it. Approved on the next round.

Traced point by point.

The pencil sketch went under the pen tool in Illustrator: seven shapes, 119 anchor points, then the black fill, the red crack, the chin vents and the wordmark. Every edge is vector, so the logo holds at any size.

One mark, every background.

Primary on light, reversed on dark, an icon for small spaces and a one-colour version for print. Tested down to 32 pixels.

Black, one red, white.

Three colours and nothing else. The typeface is Butter Haunted, outlined to shapes: the sharp, dripping edges the brief asked for, and none of the fonts it ruled out.

Print and web.

A book spine, business cards and a social profile. The process film below runs through the whole job in 75 seconds: brief, mind map, research, pencils, the revision, the vector build and the reveal.