Lana Turner once said, “A gentleman is simply a patient wolf.”
One of my dearest friends, whom I and others call “Maverick”, loves wolves. Lots of people have things they like a lot. Maverick has wolves tattooed across his shoulders. Mav is also a runner. We have run thousands of miles together over the last dozen or more years, in training and in long races and relays. In all that time I never created a logo for Mav. Granted, he never asked, but I should have done it anyway.
So he mentioned it one day and I thought, “&%!*, I should have already done that!” So I got started.
I wanted to include a wolf in icon form, but also have it be a monogram graphic logo. I thought it should be square so it would work as a social media icon. It needed to be simple so it would be reasonable to embroider it on clothes and bags and hats. No problem…
As I often do, I started by looking at wolf images on the webs. Getting the distinctive things about their heads in my head. Letting the wolf in the pen as it were. I eventually found this:
Which is not a great wolf, but I saw the center of an “M” and started imagining something like this (but much better) with the rest of the M as solid mass on either side.
It was very hard to get the face, ears, nose and eyes right. Very slight changes in the eyes made a big difference in how it looked overall. Some versions looked like a cat, some like a fox, and some like a missing link. Lots of iterations later it finally came together.
The quote is one that Maverick signs all his emails with. It kind of sums up how he approaches the world, head on.
The logo works without the text and in grey scale and monochrome:
Finally, I was messing around with the logo and the letters A V, for “MAV” and this happened. If I look closely I see the body of the wolf in the “AV”…
