Family Crest Project
By: Keegan Spotts
Introduction:
Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a modernized crest for the Spotts family. This is my first time using Adobe Illustrator, and I'm starting to like it the more I use it. I came from using Adobe Photoshop before though, so the learning curve wasn't extremely hard. My goal with this project was to make something that me and my family could be proud of and recognize all of the great things that make us the Spotts family.
Inspiration:
When I started the project, I knew that I wanted to incorporate my family's heritage into the crest, but I didn't have much else. As I worked on this project, many of the ideas for my crest came from others I looked at. Many aspects of my crest, such as the laurels, nameplate, and layout came from other crests I found on Behance. I'll display pictures of a few of the crests that inspired me the most, but here is the link to all of the projects I looked at for inspiration:
https://www.behance.net/collection/169025193/Family-Crest-Project
Sketches and Ideas:
My original ideas consisted of things I really liked, but not necessarily things that defined my family. This group included the clover and dog, but I also didn't include the American flag sketch because I felt like the flag didn't fit well into my crest designs. In the end I chose to go with the snake-based nameplate, a badge-like crest shape, and laurels surrounding it all.
Drafts:
On this project, I was pretty confident in what would be my final design, but I still wanted to have some different versions of the crest so I could see what aspects of my crest were good and what could be improved. This resulted in me changing the shape of the crest into a rounded rectangle, and also creating a black and white crest to ensure my design was simple and could be easily understood. My three main drafts ended up looking like this:
Final:
In the end, I chose my first draft as my final and best draft of my family crest. The symbols fit the shape of the crest much better, and the laurels match the shape of the crest. To break things down a bit, I'll explain each part of the crest and what it means. First, the nameplate uses an old English font because my family hails from Europe, and the snake wrapping around represents the Arizona Diamondbacks, our favorite baseball team. The trophy represents competition and sports, as those are things that have always ran in my family. The cactus is actually in combination with a railroad, as we live in the desert and my grandparents worked on the railroad when they were young. The plus sign represents positivity and a mathematical mindset that most of my family possesses. Finally, the spots represent our last name, Spotts, and they are in red because our favorite color is Sedona Red. Hopefully this crest can be something that I can show my kids when I'm older, and I can tell them the stories behind it.
