Dude, What the Fuck!?

What the hell was that image on the slider leading to this post?
No. It couldn’t be.

That’s right. We’ve said for years we were working on it.
Well, that’s a lie. We’ve said for years that we wish we were working on it, but that Phil’s slacker ass won’t get in gear.
That’s changed.

Episode 10 is pretty much ready.
The trailer is pretty much ready.
And now we’re just waiting on Machinima.com to get it all out for us (or at least we will be once we send them the files this week).

But as part of a preview to the new episode, I’d like to show you something that’s not in the new episode: the new DWMM Logo for season two.

The first logo for the series was made back in 2004.

Wow. That’s not attractive, is it? It served its role well at the time, but we’ve always wanted to make it better, to bring it into 2012, or whatever year it was when we happened to be bitching about it. I made a few attempts over the years, but I don’t know where those files went. Fed up with the bitching and moaning, I told Phil “We’re doing it today.”

And we did.

Here’s the thing that some of you may not know: I am a fucking goddess at photoshop. Even Phil somehow manages to keep forgetting that. But then the magic happens.
This first image, this isn’t the magic. This is the flower of kingsfoil that we start chopping up because we realize that we need something to start from before the magic can even dream of happening.

The first thing I do whenever I start a logo project, whether it’s for Finite Universe or any of my design clients, is find a font. I typed in the word “DUDE”, highlighted it, and started scrolling through the… let’s see… Jesus tits on Christ: 600 fonts I have installed. Actually, to be entirely honest, I was expecting more than that. Anyway, I was scrolling through them, and came upon this weird goofy thing. I didn’t know what to think. Was it good? Was it bad? It’s… interesting. I typed out the full show name and did some childish tilting on the letters, putting it against a gray gradient which is how I always present early draft logos. Shipped it to Phil. He looked and immediately thought… wtf… it’s… interesting.

That interesting feeling is a fun one to me. Good is easy, bad is easy. But interesting, we must be on to something. So I started refining.

One of the inspiration logos Phil had mentioned was the “Orcs Must Die” logo. I tried to take some of its aesthetics and blend it with the vibe of our own show. The blue on blue coinish stamped metal thing in the background brought in the classic DWMM horse graphic. Phil hated the metal thing, as much as it’s one of my favorite effects to create and use. It was scrapped, and we focused on the text.

There was a color shift at this point, as we tried multiple different colors. I thought this was a winner as is, but we iterated further, struggling to find something because Phil is absolutely incapable of expressing actual thoughts about things.

One of Phil’s unspeakable thoughts was “This logo here, look at it. It has this two color thing going on.”
“You mean a gradient?”
“Yeah, try one of those.”
“Ughhhhhhhhhh.”
“Yeah, that’s ugly. You used the wrong colors.”
“What colors should I use.”
“I don’t know. What am I, a designer?”
“I fucking hate you, Phil.”

We scrapped the gradient.

At this point, Skitch added his suggestion:

We laughed.

Phil at this point was going through the piling up files of logos in our dropbox and saw the very first one. “Ooh! I like that one! What happened to that font!?”
Skitch and I groaned at each other in steam chat.
“It’s the same god damned font, Phil.”
“But… it’s flat!”
“Do you like it flat?”
“Yeah!”
“THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY SO WHEN YOU FIRST SAW THIS?”
“I didn’t see this before.”
Another groan in steam chat.

It did however strike me at this point that Phil had not seen the text colored and flat, which was an option I had shown Skitch while Phil was AFK.

He loved it. I thought we were done. Apparently he didn’t love it enough.
The horse was in a bad position. Apparently “no one will be able to tell it’s a horse”.
http://clientsfromhell.net/

I was having trouble finding a different position for the horse that looked good, but thankfully Skitch jumped in to help out.

“Oh wow! I never thought of that position, that’s kind of good.” – Me.
“Can we try him on the other side?” – Phil

Phil was starting to get happy. But not enough.
“It needs to be… dirty… grungy…”
“Is our show dirty and grungy to you?”
“It needs texture.”
“What kind of texture?”
“Like dirt, or grunge.”
“I fucking hate you Phil.”
“Just try it.”
“I’ll do it just so you can see how bad it’s going to look.”
“Well yeah, you’re going to make it look bad because you don’t like it.”
“Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Let me do my fucking job.”

It wasn’t horrible. I still don’t feel it was “our show”, but what can I say? I’m fucking amazing at photoshop, and I made it look better than I thought it would. But like I said, just not our show.

Phil: “Meet me half way and lighten it up a bit.”
I lightened it.

“Meet me half way again.”
“No, fuck you. That’s me coming 75% of the way. And I’m doing all the god damned work.
We decided it was actually really good. My theory is that the lighter texture grunginess didn’t make it look dirty, it just made it look like it had been drawn on paper, which added to the childish feel of the entire thing, which was what I liked about the font in the first place. I had to admit that this was one of the very rare instances where “Phil was right”. Though only barely, and he wasn’t right for the reasons he thought he was, and god fucking knows he’d never be able to articulate why he though he was clearly enough for us to tell anyway. Ugh.

The remaining question was whether it would look good on both Black and White, the two colors it was most likely to appear against.

Well? You tell me.

So what do you think? Like the new DWMM logo? Like it so much you want to put it on your desktop as a wallpaper? Well shit, son. I got you covered.

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Or, if you prefer something a little less blatant and a little more minimalist cool, you can grab this one, which happens to have just become *my* desktop wallpaper:

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Ok, so you got all the way down here, probably more concerned about DWMM10 than what the season 2 logo looks like. I don’t blame you. Keep an eye out for the trailer. I promise you it’s coming soon, and believe me: it’ll get you wet.