100 Logos in 100(ish) Days: What I Loved, Laboured and Learned from an Accidental Passion Project

I doodle. A lot. It’s part of my design process – and has almost become second nature when there’s any situation that allows for a pen in hand and a notebook in front of me.

But what if those doodles became more than just a step in a process? What if they could align to something more personal?

That’s a question I asked myself a hundred (ish – more on that later) days ago. I was at a bit of an impasse. In between jobs and feeling the need to do something that gave myself a bit of a challenge, a bit of fresh impetus.

I work in an industry were a doodle or drawing can be a very powerful thing. They generate ideas and assets that count for a lot. It doesn’t take an expensive branding agency to tell you the power of a logo or brand mascot, for instance. So I took that thought about the power of logos and asked myself ‘why not see if I could create a logo a day, for one hundred days, to produce a collection that reflected my passion’?

It sounded fun, it would evolve my skillset and it would grow my portfolio – and I’m pretty proud of the result. But I’m also invigorated by some of the lessons I learned along the way...

Don’t force it

OK, so I didn’t quite complete the task in 100 days. I did try – I got to about 60 consecutive days of creating and posting logos. I started to build up a nice collection. But then life got busier. I got a new job, amongst other things. I felt like I was burning out on this project, and I wasn’t enjoying doing it as much.

So I took a break. I initially felt guilty about that. But then when I returned to the challenge a few weeks later, I found that the results were much better. You need inspiration from somewhere, and I found I’d got into the habit of opening a laptop and staring at a blank screen, just hoping ideas would come.

A break made me feel more inspired, it helped me get my mind working in a different way again. I realised that it was important to recognise that on a passion project, when you set your own deadline, pushing yourself into work that won’t be as strong was pointless. And yes, while deadlines loom more dramatically in the client world, I think we can take learnings from this too – if you’re burning out, take a step back (no matter for how short a period of time), have a break and return a bit fresher. You’ll have less time, but far more inspiration, which can get the next stage of the process moving quicker.

Return to the essence

Taking a break often forced me to refocus on what mattered most with the project. This idea of doodling – a practice that’s meant to be free and easy and spontaneous. I’d back myself into a corner when I was trying to take the project seriously and just force myself to post something, whereas actually returning to the essence of the project allowed me to relax and build new momentum.

Not forcing the topic helped me open my mind to fresh concepts. It allowed ideas to flow more seamlessly and let one idea spark another.

Returning to the heart of the problem may not seem as easy when you’re not setting your own brief, but the project proved how even one borne of passion can tie you in knots. So if you find yourself stuck on a client project, take a step back, return to the brief and see if you can recapture what made it such a challenge or opportunity in the first place.

Always look at the bigger picture

Creating a hundred logos meant conjuring a hundred different ideas. As I mentioned above, sometimes one idea sparked another, and I think you can see some examples where I created logos in tandem. This was both a good and bad thing. I like how some of them have a natural relationship with another, but after a while I’d look at them all as a collection and realise I could push myself more and needed more variety.

When you’re working on a long-term project, it’s sometimes easy to just focus on what needs to be achieved that day. But it’s also important to step back and ensure you’re looking at the bigger picture too. I didn’t want to doodle myself into a corner by losing sight of the overall collection, but I also didn’t want it to feel so random that the final result didn’t have meaning.

The project showed me how many different ways you can approach the same brief. That an idea can have many different faces if you give it the space to breathe.

Because while I’d set myself a challenge with perhaps too many initial constraints, in the end I just wanted to create a cool poster. To create a piece of work that could inspire myself. And hopefully it inspires others too.