>

 

United by Drums

Prior to the creation of United-by-Drums.com, its members had all been displaced after their original forum shut down. Rather than go their seperate ways, these drummers, who had come from all over the world to talk about a variety of topics, chose to start a new one. As is the case with all messageboards, the members did not always see eye-to-eye. Despite this, there was one thing that they all agreed on: it was drumming that had brought them together; and so United by Drums was born.

When I first heard the name "United by Drums," it reminded me of one of my favorite albums United By Fate by the band Rival Schools. The cover of the album, which was created by Dominic Greensmith, is a 2-color, drawing entitled "Joggers." I've always liked the the cover of the album because, despite being very minimalistic, it sums up the complex idea of "us against the world." I thought this image was quite fitting for UbD since (as numerous musician jokes can attest to), when it comes to bands, the drummer is usually the odd man out and UbD was essentially a bunch of odd men out that had joined together. So I drew on "Joggers" for my inspiration, but the design took it's own shape in the end.

 
Using the album as a template, I removed the joggers from the picture and recreated the original lines.

Since the joggers were going to be replaced by a drum (by nature, a fairly symmetrical object), I made sure to use a picture that lacked symmetry so it would show clearly as a silhouette. The angle and the snare clutch (the little handle on the side of the drum) is key to making the silhoutte clear.

 

 Next, the snare drum was layered over the background.
After being placed above the background, the drum was masked with only one color. I found that the original lines in the background were colliding with parts of the drum that were key to making it identifiable.

To remedy the line problem, I removed some of them around key areas such as the aforementioned snare clutch. Unfortunately, doing so killed much of the depth and appeal of the original design. I also converted the color of the image to cyan, something I had always intended to do - keeping with my idea of integrating unorthodox colors and making them work.

 

 Being disatisfied with the "finished" project, I decided to scrap the lines and try some pinstriping instead. I'm a big fan of simple pinstripes as they can really make a plain object (a circle, in this case) stand out and come to life..

Being happy with my pinstripe experiment, I extended them out further to include the name of the messageboard. This western, saloon-style font was more or less a happy accident. Once again, it was an exercise in taking something out of the ordinary and making it work for my own purposes.

 

After having so much good luck with the pinstripes and the font, I felt like I was beginning to press my luck. Despite this, something seemed to be missing. Looking at the logo, I noticed that the pinstripes made the logo look very similar to an overhead picture of a drum. With this in mind, I added half-circles around the edge of the logo, giving it look of a drum with die-cast hoops.