Charli Marie

logo cleanup and animation

Project goals

• give the design direction of the channel even more legitimacy with a killer logo/animation
• clean up the current logo
• give it a boost of life with animation (potentially similar in style to the Austin Saylor animation)

Logo before and after

The focus on the logo clean up was smoothing out the curves and working on the line weight of the letters. I achieved this by reducing the number of anchor points and keeping them primarily on the extreme parts of the curves (top, left, bottom, right). 

For the "a" and "r", I did some hand lettering on paper to work out a form that would match the whole piece really well.

I brought the first leg of the "M" up to the baseline for a few reasons. The flourish/underline from the M felt really good tucked in a little tighter to the baseline. The M has enough visual weight with the flourish and it's height to match the size of the "C".

Logo animation

The original Charli Marie animation was a write on animation that took place over 2 seconds. It was a well executed animation, but lacked some flare. What I did for this animation was imagine each letter having a specific set of characteristics. The main words I came up with for these characteristics were fun, lively, and bouncy. I experimented with less extreme versions of these characteristics and more extreme version. Ultimately, the above animation felt like the right balance of bounce, speed, timing, and flow.

Transition to title screen

The transition is built to look smooth and natural, as well as easy to implement for each new video.

Background colors

I built the background color-change with the four current brand colors. This setup allows for many options (start with any of the four colors and change to any of the other four colors... as well as making the colors semi-transparent to show footage beneath).

Final thoughts

This was a really fun project to work on. Charli was great to work with and trusted me and my process and I'm confident the end product is a great solution to her problem/goals.