The Pain of a Do-Over

It's not really a secret that I like to dabble with photo manipulation and digital art. I love making something come to life on the computer screen, or to give it a new life. This proves particularly handy when it comes to branding what's mine. I designed the D4AM logo (which I'm going to remake soon) and I've recently been designing the mascot/logo for my new local project-blog. The mascot was Capuchino, the White-Headed Capuchin Monkey.

And this is him

Research, brainstorming, and general idea pull through, took me about a week. I knew I wanted the face of the monkey, something cute that would instantly catch your eye when you see the sticker on the hipster-hangout bathroom stall. I wanted to give him earphones because of the musical influence running the project, and because drawing a Capuchin's ears proves to be a bitch. I wanted them red to stand out, make them noticeable. I wanted him to smile, which wasn't the easiest task because my model monkey was the serious type. The execution took about 24 hours. I'm not saying I took a day to make him, I mean I literally spent 24 hours before I was comfortable with the result. Capuchino. My baby.

I like to do the fun things first, so Capuchino was made before any other part of the project. Before material, before layouts, and before officially selecting a color scheme. I figured pink red and yellow would be nice enough. I was wrong. I later settled for sunset gradients. A nice pastel salmon would transition into a bright  dehydrated-piss-yellow. When I put it up against the title in that perfect font, I knew I found the look. Give it that well-done old-school look. Add some flair here, play with some greens there, funkify the layout, realize your mascot doesn't look like the rest of the site, tweak the font sizes for— the mascot doesn't look like the rest of the site. I fucked up.

For a few hours I tried to make it work. I tried to incorporate the new color scheme into Capuchino. I tried to make certain areas gradient, I tried making him more simple. Eventually I realized that I was ruining my baby for the sake of the rest of the site. There was no fixing him, he was made to perfection when I finished him. It was when I realized that I couldn't even use my base drawings anymore, that the logo wouldn't even be a monkey, that my mood became bitter sweet. The project will be better. The next idea won't rely on colors at all. It's classy, and it's pleasing to the eye. I'm just not looking forward to the do-over, to the hours of work I'm going to be putting into something that most people won't even fully understand as anything more than a brand of some sort. All this, and my general audience might never even see the first ideas.

Sucks. But now we're on to better things.