Showcase: Nickelodeon Lost in the West Logo

I’ve been working a lot with Nickelodeon recently (which is awesome!), and I want to share a little bit of the process of developing a logo for one of their projects. Lost in the West is a fun 3-part mini-series action/adventure involving time travel. Sweet!

When we start a project, the series is still in production, i.e., being filmed in Spain in this case, and they give me a little background on the film – the plots lines, production stills, character bios – plus some concepts the team has developed for key art (the poster art you might see to promote the series). I was told some of the inspiration came from Back to the Future and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and the logo should communicate “wild west” and “time travel” as well as feel fun, cinematic, and Nickelodeon.

I always start concepting on projects with word lists and (messy!) sketches. You can see some of that here:

From there, I’ll identify some of the ideas I think have potential and move to rough digital comps, exploring ideas, typefaces, and hierarchy. Here are a few of the ideas I presented in the first round:
They give me feedback on what they think is working or not working, if they want to see more exploration of a certain direction or even something they’re not seeing at all, but would like to. We go through several rounds, usually narrowing it down to 2 or 3 concepts to do color exploration on as well as various small versioned-out tweaks. You can see some of that versioning and exploration here:

Ultimately, they narrow it down to one, we do more small-tweak versioning (that’s totally a technical term) and color exploration, and then I deliver the final logo. After that it’s typically still several months until the project starts being promoted, and it’s loads of fun when I get to see it out in the world!