The design is inspired by the thematic components I derived from the contest description:
•Cannabis
•Industry Trade Show
•Washington State
•West meets East
•Spokane
•Industry Trade Show
•Washington State
•West meets East
•Spokane
I could see the basic idea in my head: I wanted the state of Washington visually divided into east and west by a marijuana leaf, with the text "EVERCANNAFEST 2019" arranged in a circle around the central image.
Next, I needed to choose a typeface that would work well with the required text: EVERCANNAFEST 2019 (all caps required.) So I started looking at those characters in every typeface I could, and before long I had narrowed down the field to four or five typefaces that worked better than all the others. And among those, only one clearly stood out to me as the best. BOOM! I was on my way. But then I got stuck:
I liked the design, but it had problems, and I was too close to it to see how to fix them. I kept fussing with details that didn't address the underlying issues. Why had I locked into a circle? There was too much meaningless empty space. The scale seemed off; some important elements were too small. It felt too formal, like a coin or a medal. It lacked solidity and integration; it did not amount to more than the sum of its parts. But what was I going to do with "EVERCANNAFEST2019" if not set it in a circle? It was so long and ungainly: hard to read, hard to say, and hard to understand. It seemed it might be easier if it were broken into smaller chunks. And there was nothing in the rules about putting it all on one line. So I stacked EVER, CANNA, FEST, and 2019, with tight linespacing, and placed the resulting shape on top of the marijuana leaf. That centralized everything, and solved most of the problems in one fell swoop. It also transformed the cannabis leaf into a cannabis bud! It's so fun when things come together like that! It feels like solving a puzzle. Just a few tweaks and enhancements later the form was finalized, and all that was left to be done were the colors.
Initial version with stacked text
