Andrew van Wert Audio
Nashville’s Audio Engineer
Andrew, a producer, mix engineer, master engineer, and just an overall talented music guy, came to me needing a logo and a website. I thought that was all fine and dandy, but might as well at least give him a little brand to start with, as well. After all, he is one of the more meticulous and diligent audio engineers in Nashville.
Given that the brand centers around him, it seemed appropriate to go with a name such as Andrew van Wert Audio. Keep it simple.
I wanted the logo to be clean, geometric, and still maintain readability. Why? Because the way that Andrew approaches audio engineering is by fine-tuning every last vocal, making sure every sound is crisp, and using a lot of algorithms to ensure a song is mixed and mastered properly. That’s why I chose to use his initials “AvW” (and yes, it matters to him that the ‘v’ is lower-case) as the logo. I really enjoyed making this logo, I had sketched it out multiple times on a notebook, and couldn’t get the precision I wanted, so I took it straight into Illustrator, set up a grid, and went to work. I think my favorite part of the whole logo is the really subtle saw wave (pardon my music-nerdiness) that makes up the top of the ‘W’ and houses the negative space ‘v’.
For the type, I elected to use something that was, again, clean and geometric. Mundial was what I felt best to use for “Andrew van Wert” and Muli in ALL CAPS for “AUDIO” as a nice little accent. Using two sans serif fonts was definitely a choice that I felt kind of strange about, but one that I thought turned out pretty well. I feel like designers have to live in the tension of typography pretty often.
I wanted the color palette to have some pop, but still maintain the sophistication and cleanliness that I feel so much encapsulates how Andrew approaches music. Black and white do the heavy lifting, while iridescent gradients add the pop. He also really wanted to use these colors, I didn’t fight him, but a little tinkering here and there never hurt anybody. I like how it came together, especially on the final website.
I also made him a little motion graphic with his logo, opting to simply have the line work animate very much like a waveform. I had the edges poke out for a fraction of a second, to then have them “cleaned up” resulting in the logo as it should be. I did this because of how Andrew will often take a demo that he has to clean up himself in order to get it to the highest possible quality.
Andrew is a good guy. He was patient with me as I tinkered with different concepts and kept thinking of new ideas to further his brand. I’m sure there will be more opportunities to create assets for his business, which I’m stoked about. But for now, I leave you with a spinning AvW CD case:
