

It’s been a bit too long since my last update! I’ve been waiting for a bit as the same ol’ stuff is going on and I haven’t been able to really dig into game development as I’d like, since they’re now bricking the office. But they’ll be done in a week, and then I’ll finally have peace and quiet to work all day, every day. But rather than waiting till then to give another update, I thought I’d give a quick sneak peek at the new logo for the game.

Logos have always intrigued me, but is something I’m woefully bad at. That hasn’t stopped me from trying, but like most things I eventually try and try until I give up and get someone who’s better at it to do it. For CSD 1 I had a great artist, Samantha Kyle, whip up this fun logo.





I don’t think I had any real input on this one, other than picking and choosing from several revisions on which one I liked. But it was one that really grew on me.

For the sequel, I initially decided to do the logo myself. I wanted something that looked “upscale,” like it was a fancier restaurant type thing. I also wanted to have no background elements on it so I could overlay it better on art and such. So, I started to come up with my own treatments.





Ultimately I went for a longer logo with a subtitle and more compact design. That’s what I’ve had for a while now-



I thought “oh man, I nailed it!” and thought yeah, no need to revisit this! Maybe I’m an awesome artist after all.

Then something funny happened as the months went by. I started to hate the logo. Working with it on different art pieces (such as the food reveals) I realized it was hard to make it stand out on certain backgrounds. It lost a lot of legibility when it was shrunk down, and got lost easily when on busier backgrounds.





You can see as the logos get smaller how the original CSD logo still looks quite nice, while the CSD 2 logo gets worse and worse, to the point where there’s little left to distinguish it from anything. This is probably Logo Design 101, but I quickly found my logo to just plain not work well, whether that was in game or on a background that was anything but a solid color. So I decided to get someone who’s way better at all this than me. That was Steven Godfrey, an awesome logo designer who runs C88, or Circa Eighty Eight, and he did a great job at figuring out something that was completely new, but retained the fun elements of the original logo. He had a bunch of ideas to start with.



Of these we decided not to do any that focused on a specific food (like a pizza or hamburger), and not to call too much into a design that locks it to a specific restaurant tier (logo G above looks like a 1-2 star restaurant logo with the checker tiles, but that excludes it from the higher tier restaurants). There were so many routes to go that I wasn’t really sure what the best way to proceed.

But, eventually it got to a place where I’m really excited about it, and it works in pretty much every situation I’ve used it in so far. So here it is!



I love the cleanness of the logo, and it shrinks down very well. It keeps the same playful elements of the original one, while establishing a smaller color palette so that it can work on various medias. It just looks plain fun, something my original logo totally lacked.



Man, I’m so glad Steve took over and did an amazing job with the logo. I couldn’t be happier! This logo will appear on the new website for CSD2 which I plan to launch soon, as well as being in everything that represents CSD 2 from here on out.



Later this month I’ll have a quick post on the music of CSD 2, followed by some more gameplay updates and even a spiffy new office tour! Woo!

