A close friend of mine from high school approached me, asking on behalf of a stable, if I could create a logo. I had some free time, and took to work.

The name Ffenix means Phoenix and is a symbol of power and rebirth; as this stable seeks to be a new life for the horses that live there. They wanted this, as well as some imagery of a horse to wrap this message together.

My skills in Illustrator are amateurish at best, so it took me a couple of weeks of trial and error to get something I was happy with. I looked at many phoenix and horse icons and decided that the best approach that was within my abilities was to have a phoenix surrounding a horse head like a frame.

Logo
The Ffenix Stables logo.

I started with the horse head, using an image as a reference. To begin with, I was working with black lines that were the standard square endings. I decided it didn't look elegent enough and curved the edges of the strokes and changed a couple of the line weights with the weight tool. Then, I got to work on the pheonix.

Still working in solid black, I created the head and wings with the tail that arches around. It looked too much like a serpent, so I created a 'feather' that I could duplicate to make a nice tail. This turned out okay, but once I started adding these feathers to the rest of the body, it looked great.

Next came the fill. Ffenix wanted a purple, but had nothing specific in mind, giving me a bit of freedom to experiment. A pheonix is a bird of burning crimson flames, and I couldn't do it justice with just a solid colour. I decided that I needed a gradient of two purples to give it a fiery effect, leading to the logo that it is now.

I also created solid colour variants in black, white and purple so that it could be used anywhere on any setting. I created a little one page guide on where each should be used and sent it off.

Would I do anything diferently?

If I did this again, I might do the gradient differently. I have since learned a pretty neat trick from a random Adobe ad on YouTube with making gradients that follow a path. I think this could be effective in making the gradient work even better.