BY CHUCK GREEN I don't know about you but I love to see examples of how other designers work—they reveal better (or worse) ways of doing things and allow me to gauge whether my methods are mainstream or totally whacked-out. “If anyone finds out how I obsess about this stuff,” I tell myself, “they'll stick me in a home.”

The problem is that step-by-step examples are rare. Why? Mainly because unless you are interested in sharing such information, there isn't much reason for recording it. And even if you are, detailing the steps can get in the way of the process. If I'm ready to move to the next stage of an idea, I am normally not interested in recording what I've done to get there.

The good news is I rarely let normal get in my way. What follows are some of the steps I took to create a recent logo. I saved some of the graphics I created along the way and have attempted to recall a little bit about what I was thinking. There is, of course, more to a logo design process than what you see here—this exercise includes little about the typical ramp up of preliminary discussions, research, and so on—space, time, and vanity limit me to showing just a portion of the process.

I don't know about you, but I start out on paper. I find it most productive to sketch out ideas in a notebook. A Moleskine notebook is my weapon of choice—its small and sturdy enough to carry in my back pocket. (I like them so much I sell the plain and horizontal-lined flavors in the ideabook.com store— found the graph version shown here a little noisy for me.)

I'm most concerned with concepts at this stage—not designs. To my way of thinking, designs emerge from concepts, concepts do not emerge from designs. My goal in creating a logo is, at best, to demonstrate the benefit of using the product or service and at minimum to create a visual symbol of the subject matter.

I often show my clients those rough ideas. I have found that getting feedback on basic concepts is best for everyone involved. It allows us to weed out ideas that look good to me but don't work for the client. It acknowledges that the client knows the subject best, no matter how much research I do.

What may appear to me to be a great solution to the problem sometimes just doesn't work for reasons I could not be expected to know.

The logo I'll discuss here was designed for a helicopter transport company—Metro Aviation. I started by going through my sketches and choosing the concepts I thought had most merit.

Step 1 (below) > I created some slightly tighter drawings of five of the ideas—the first, something to symbolize the basic rotor and lift dynamics.