Ryan Schmidt

Bottega

Exhibition: Spread v1

The Process

My client was after something ‘clean, sexy and modern with a handwritten look (perhaps)’. When approaching a new identity I like to play with the letterforms and how each letter interacts with the others. Basically I write the word in uppercase, lowercase and mixed case then look at it from all angles. At first I started to play with a modern geometric handwritten feel I kept wanting to do something with the double lowercase Ts. I really enjoyed the symmetry of the two Ts sandwiched by the O and the E. I thought about handwriting and how I would cross both Ts with one line and started playing with that. I started working on condensing the wordmark by tightening up the spaces between the letters and eliminating elements where I could etc. I really liked what happened when the two Ts became one but still stood alone as their own letterforms. During this process I created the uppercase version of the wordmark which eventually became the final wordmark with a few tweaks and iterations. I really enjoyed the uppercase mark but didn’t think it was the direction my client wanted to pursue and continued to flush out other directions before coming back around and creating the final wordmark.