When my friends Cynthia and Neil asked me to design the logo for their new dental design lab they’re opening in Anchorage Alaska, I asked ‘What’s the name of it?’ ‘Spectrum,’ she said.
We talked about it some more. I asked if she had any specific concepts, visuals; references to style that might guide me with some initial concepts. Aesthetic guidelines.
That’s when Cynthia said ‘Well, we’re quality – kind of like a ’boutique.’
I never would have associated ’boutique’ with a dental lab, but there it was. And that immediately expanded the scope of creative possibilities, beyond the strictly clinical world of dental labs.
Of course, I’m immediately flooded with c-r-a-z-y ideas. For some reason, the Dark Side of the Moon cover, with its spectrum image flashed in my mind. Really ‘dental’ image, right? Turns out, Neil – who is a highly trained master craftsman from South Africa – had the same idea. And that was the impetus for the design.
Ultimately, we tried to take it away form the literal visual connection to the album cover. A little too over-the-top for a lab. Reversing the color scheme and making it white diminished that visual connection. Initially, we tried one tooth in order to somewhat mimic the pyramid from the cover. Something monolithic.
But then we moved away from that idea, precisely because it was so monolithic. Having a row of teeth – instead of one tooth – is more like a spectrum. I think we ended up with something cool – at least different from a lot of other dental lab logos circulating out there.
Final artwork is vector-based with transparencies created in Adobe Illustrator. The comps were created with shape layers in Photoshop. On the wide panorama, I applied a ‘zoom blur’ on the spectrum image, set at draft quality (instead of high quality). The draft version creates a more pixelated view, which I felt gave a ‘light particle’ look. The zoom-blur applied at 10 percent, in effect, gave a subtle twist to the beam of light, which also gives that effect of the light being refracted.
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