At the end of 2011 I had a West Point student referred to me to design their company patch. He said they were the A-1 company, they had chosen “The Axemen” as their name and “If you’re not first, you’re last” as their motto.
I put together some rough sketches and compiled some samples from the Internet to see what they had in mind. The majority of my branding work was generally gender-neutral, sometimes leaning towards feminine, so I challenged myself to come up with a design that was appealing to guys.
I hadn’t ever done patch design before, so I did a little reading and found out that vector art was generally the best style and keeping the distinct color count as low as possible was preferred. The direction the client wanted to go with was the human lumberjack on the mountain at night, so we worked through a few iterations until we arrived at a design and color scheme that satisfied him.
Unfortunately, certain guidelines prevented them from using particular phrases in the patch design, and they were forced to ask for a slight redesign to make the logo less overtly masculine. The final result ended up being a version of the original design but with an ax instead of a lumberjack (an attempt to make the design more gender neutral).
