If there’s one thing I hate, together with having my teeth drilled by the dentist, queuing at the post office and filling in tax forms, is doing logos.

As a matter of fact, not unlike most Illustrators of my generation, making logos was exactly how I started my career, in a small, now defunct advertising company in Northern Italy.
You know, just to “get a foot in the industry”.

Photoshop was a novelty back then, the Internet was at its beginnings, and every time there was some feedback we had to draw the thing back from scratch. I mean, with pencils, markers and paper.

No hold on, let me rephrase that: we had to draw the DAMN thing back from scratch.

And one thing I learned in my time in advertising, is that your clients would always require the highest possible amount of feedback, always.

So there I was , drawing over and over again something I had no interest whatsoever in, which eventually led to my deepest disgust towards anything even remotely related to logo-making.

It’s not that I don’t have respect in the profession. I know there’s an entire, huge set of skills involved in making a good logo.
It’s just that I probably didn’t have those skills, and I had no interest whatsoever in developing them.

It is with surprise then, that at some point, about a year ago, I heard myself slipping to my bunch of good Internet friends that I would be glad to redraw the logo of Grim Sleepers, our player Corporation in EVE Online.

It might have been because I had just finished watching Sons of Anarchy, and I kind of liked the aesthetics of bikers leather, or something like that.

The thing is, I actually enjoyed the entire process, and I’m kind of pleased with the results.

Ok, it’s not like I designed Nike’s logo or anything, and drawing a biker-style cyborg skull is a lot closer to what I do normally, but still.

There were more, but being them just slight variations of the logos above I’ll save you some band width.

There also was a coloured version of the one we picked, I just can’t find it on my machine right now.
I’ll ask one of my corpsies if they still have it.

Since then we all abandoned EVE to one degree or another, and when I came across these logos in my Old_Stuff folder I went all “awwww, look at that”.

I loved my corp.
I had also considered getting a new tat with the Grim Sleepers’ logo.
Oh well, good times.

by Paolo Puggioni