Logo for FlowPlayer
September 20th, 2007 by Jason
Recently, we were asked to create a logo for the very cool open source Flash video player, FlowPlayer. We actually use FlowPlayer in our animation portfolio, so we were glad to work on this and honored that the program’s developer, Anssi Piirainen would want us to create one. We were essentially given free reign and had a blast coming up with ideas. Seeing as how we had such a good time, we figured we’d share some of the process on what went into creating the logo.
To start, we took some of the direction we’d gotten and started brainstorming. The idea was to emphasize the idea of liquid as it relates to the program’s name and the idea of involving a fish was suggested. Based on that and some of the illustration work we did for our Firefox Flicks entry last year, the three of us came up with the notion of using a fish coming out of jack-in-the-box. Being the resident illustrator in the group, Warren did all of the pencil and inking work on the fish and the jack-in-the-box. With the logo completed, we played with a handful of color combinations, ultimately landing on Roberto’s blue/green combination.
While Warren and Roberto got the main part of the logo worked out, I played with an idea for something to be used while loading video in the player and for use when the player is set in fullscreen mode. Keeping with the idea of ‘flow’, we settled on the painted enso symbol used in Japanese Zen paintings. This graphic was sent along with the finalized fish for approval from FlowPlayer’s developer.
We were quite pleased to hear that he enjoyed it, so we set to finalizing the logo and incorporating the text. To do this, we traced the fish in Inkscape to get an easily resized vector graphic. The enso graphic was already created in Inkscape, so that portion was ready to go. After a bit of color tweaking, we were able to incorporate the enso symbol with the text to tie the enso and fish graphics together (point of note, the first and most obvious choice for the enso’s location was as the ‘o’ in FlowPlayer, but it didn’t connect the word well and it didn’t match the font weight very well). That took a fair amount of tweaking and back-and-forth critique amongst the three of us, but ultimately we landed on something we could all agree upon.
Good thing for us: Anssi likes it as much as we do. We actually have one more step to do in order to really finish it, and the good news (for me) is that this will involve a little bit of animation. Stay tuned and we’ll post an in-depth description of that process as well. In the meantime, go check out FlowPlayer. It’s an excellent addition to any website that needs to play Flash video and it’s open source, distributed under the Apache License. We’ve found great use for it and certainly recommend it for anyone wanting to use it in their own website.