THE GROWLERS ARE, LIKE, OFFICIAL!

image courtesy Calvin Wang

I toyed with the idea of a cartoon character first. (I’ve always liked Berke Breathed’s Bloom County cartoon eyes. Additional aside: Though an academic librarian now, I also have previous training in visual art—medical illustration, specifically.) The idea of the letters as pavement were there from the start. I designed my own typeface with a density that emphasized blackness. The character still has some potential, but it felt like we need something a little more elemental. The growler still needed to be there somehow and the idea of it becoming part or the name itself materialized.

Don’t laugh (Kate did, at least to herself) but I use PowerPoint a lot for graphic work. Librarians don’t have much call for Adobe Illustrator, so I don’t have it. And you can do amazing things with its curve-drawing function once I figured out how to tweak individual points and their splines. A few clicks for the profile, a vertical flip for the other side, a couple of extra shapes, and voila! A growler for an o. With input from Drew, Keith (the store manager), and Kate (an interior designer), I jazzed it up with a shoeprint featuring the Monotype Corsiva J from the store’s logo. (Okay, I actually ignored their suggestion to ditch the J. I’ll take the hit if you agree. I’m a big man. Figuratively.) The dashed lines cemented the pavement imagery and the Jenkintown Running Store logo the parentage. The one recommendation I did accept from the peanut gallery was to find a more open, readable typeface. Enter Impact which took the place of mine perfectly and I have no misgivings whatsoever. None. At all. Really. >snork< 

The TM gives our new logo authority. It’s legit even though it’s not registered. That would be a Ⓡ. (I teach a course on intellectual property.) Finally, with store owner Joe’s blessing the logo became a thing! And we’ve now jumped off the cliff too. Safe even, cushioned by the bodies of those who leapt before us. Let’s make a million selling merch! 
-CtCloser (Calvinthe), "Negative split or positive splat" 
Text and graphics: Calvin Wang, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0