XICO

XICO is the new and most personal alias from musician and sound designer Francisco Godinho a.k.a. XZICD, with whom I have already collaborated in different projects, such the visual album ɅVΟѺΟVɅ or the 3D artworks for Sonic Bat Libraries.

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For his new project he wanted the logo to be a representation of his eclectic music spectrum: “from ambient, downtempo, warm noise, psychedelic rock, indie, synth loops, etc.” and he defines his music as “you get lost in this miasma of the old and the new”. So for the logo he wanted to reflect all that too: “old and new f*cking each other. I would really like it to be very asymmetrical but catchy. Very late 60s/early 70s Psychedelia inspired. Like the new Suspiria’s logo, or the visual aesthetic from OPN artworks”.

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With all that in mind I started sketching on paper, trying to find visual poetic games between the letters that form XICO, and once I had enough I moved the sketches into a digital file, to clean and refine a series of proposals. From them all surfaced the best candidate, according to my taste but also pointed out by the client. Last touches were to refine its geometry and styled details.

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The brand plays with the very Escher’s optical illusion concept, where the reading of the brand is a mixture of its shape and its empty spaces, at the same time making reference to sound as an expansive wave. The logo starts with a very present and defined X in the style of logos like Xerox or Sony, with straight angles and evolves into a fluid shape being dissolved between the I-C-O letters, which connects with psychedelic concepts used in art and music.

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Last but not least I gave the logo a 3D treatment for pure promotional purposes, as introduction for this new project.