Development of App Name and Logo

App name

The purpose of my app: Photo storage and showcasing

Possible names:

Photostore?

ShowPhotoStore?

PhotoShowcase?

StoreOPhotocase?

Ultimate Photostore?

QuickPhotostore?

ConcisePhoto?

Focus-tech?

fOcus?

Narrowed down selection:

Ph-O-cus

Photo-stash

PictOstash

Final Name:
‘Pict-O-stash’       

I could have the big O in the middle be a camera lens.

A check was made that there was no other companies named Pict-O-stash. So far I have not found any, which is good.

Logo Because my aim was to make the logo semi-realistic, I started by looking up reference images of camera lenses.  Once I had found the images I wanted to use as my main reference, I opened Adobe Illustrator. 

I thought that Illustrator would be the best tool for the task because it uses a vector format, which allows shapes to be resized without affecting or reducing the quality of the image, which is particularly important when designing a logo to be used in many different settings.

Because the lens was to be front-facing, the main shapes I needed to use were just circles/ellipses so I began with the outer edge, adding a bevel effect to achieve a 3D feel.

I continued to duplicate the circles several times, making each one slightly smaller in sequence to reflect the different lens layers. The last circle I made was completely black, one to show it was the last layer, and two, to simulate the pupil of an eye. I felt that the image still looked rather flat, so I added some different gradients from light to dark, and shadow effects to give them a sense of depth.

Up until this point, the whole logo was in black and white, as seen here:

Next I wanted to experiment with colours.  In the beginning I wanted some type of purple as the main, primary website colour, as, through research, I found that each major web provider has a main colour for their brand. eg blue for ArtStation and green for Spotify.  

I experimented with purple but found this to be a little too dark and obscured much of the detail.  After trying a variety of different colour hues, I settled on a particular shade of blue, cyan (which is a slightly lighter blue).

Finally, I wanted to add some highlights to the lens to give the appearance of reflection and to add shine.  I experimented with different shapes and finally decided on white curved lines. This brought me to the image shown below:

A few days later, I had a meeting with my lecturer, who suggested that I add more colour variation to the lens part of the logo, as this would make it more accurate to how a camera lens actually looks when interacting with light. He also suggested that the highlights could be made 

bigger and to add extra shine.  Fig.2.shows the lens drawing post my meeting with the lecturer. 

At this stage, I was much happier with the result.  

Once the logo had been perfected, I then experimented with adding shadows and highlights to the surrounding space, in order to achieve the effect of neumorphism, as described in one of our early lectures. I was still not completely satisfied and so undertook a further test, making the logo into an app icon, as shown below: