Logo Design: Native American Seal

Just wrapped up a fun freelance job with a client. Here are the two finals along with some behind-the-curtain sketches and preliminary work ups so you can see how long this process turned out to be - I ran through a great number of bad versions before I hit upon something that was even remotely close to what he wanted. What can I say? He said to "throw some darts" and I threw lots of them and floundered around for a long while before hitting upon something that worked.

There was a great deal of research involved in this project since I had never done anything that was supposed to target a Native American audience. My main inspiration for the finals were beautiful Hopi designs, especially their beautiful jewelry. 

The bear paw represents strength and wisdom, two adjectives that I know should be held closely when dealing with financial decisions. One of the key guidelines given when I began this design project was that the design be "strong, powerful, masculine, colorful, and be recognizably Native American but not distinctly Ho'ma Indian (no red lobsters)." The strong symbolism of the paw worked for that pretty well. The feathers are a readily recognizable Native American symbol so that fit too.

Another bit of direction that was given was that they weren't sure they wanted the full name of the fund in the logo mark. Since they're not well known yet, I expressed my professional opinion that they needed to have the text in there until they have decent brand recognition. Even using only the abbreviation had the potential to be unclear as to the purpose of the group and the purpose of the symbol. I'm glad they allowed me to put all of the text into it.

And just to appease the curious among you, Saktce-Homa Opportunity Fund is a government grant-funded non-profit group which provides loans to Native Americans with a focus on financial literacy and community growth. I hope they'll enjoy using the logo at least as much as I enjoyed creating it for them.

Here are a couple of mockups of the logo on a business card:
Beautiful mockup template provided via GraphicBurger.

  
And now for the flops and failure gallery:

Preliminary SOF Logo Sketches - all discarded - JFleming 2015

 

More flops - These are just the most successful of the terrible ones.