My coworker, the wonderful Sameehan Patel, went to Paris a few weeks ago to see Taylor Swift on her Eras Tour. He had a great time but mentioned to me that as he walked away from the arena and saw the logo he felt like it didn't capture the show's vibe.
I’m going to admit it. I know very little to nothing about Taylor Swift. I grew up on pop punk and “matured” to punk and emo music. This is generally where my musical tastes sit.
But, I decided to investigate:
My initial thoughts:
- This font, or logo if you will, does feel a little uninspired for the tour.
- Why is it set in an old timey, western feeling font?
- Why is it yelling at me in ALL CAPS?
Strengths:
- It’s bold
- The warm sepia color evokes a feeling of nostalgia
As part of the brief from Sameehan, he tells me Taylor Swift plays songs from across her discography at the show. Duh, that’s why it’s called the “Eras” Tour!
This immediately sparked an idea in my head. What if the redesigned tour logo utilized type from Taylor Swift’s albums? If it did it might feel more connected to Taylor and the concept of the tour.
I started my journey with research and grabbing the album covers from Taylor’s discography. It was immediately apparent that there is an array of fonts and even some hand lettering across these albums.
Next, I wanted to understand and know what specific fonts were used on the albums. Searching online I quickly found a blog post written by Jake Giltsoff on maketypework.com. In the post, Jake identified the main font that was used on each album as well as the font used for the Eras Tour logo. It turns out, a good number of the fonts used on these albums are available on Adobe Fonts and if they’re not Jake has suggestions for the closest available font on Adobe Fonts. Being an Adobe Creative Cloud user this is great. This blog post was an amazing resource and cut my research time down immensely. Thank you Jake.
From there, I fired up Spotify, found Taylor Swift, hit play, installed fonts, and dug into redesigning the tour logo.
Also, I need to mention, I set a timer. My goal was to come up with a new logo in one to two hours. Time boxing added to the challenge and made this a fun exercise to flex those design muscles.
Ok, back to business. So, generally when creating a logo the logo will use one or two fonts at most. The dilemma I immediately ran into though was picking those one or two fonts for this redesign. When there are 11 albums with 11 or so fonts, which ones do you go with? Especially knowing that this is a tour where she’s playing from her entire discography.
After staring at the albums for a while two things struck me. One, I was drawn to the 1989 album the most. The hand lettering on the original and re-recorded albums felt authentic. I like that and I like DIY. Second, and this is a big observation, I realized “The Eras Tour” is 11 characters long and knowing there are 11 albums the light bulb went off in my pop punk, punk, emo head…
We’re going full DIY punk for this logo redesign.
My logic for this design was that each letter in “The Eras Tour” would pull from one album’s font. Effectively creating a cut up magazine, Sex Pistols style, piece of art.
I could almost imagine Taylor sitting in her living room cutting up her album covers to create this logo.
I pulled the fonts onto an artboard and took stock.
My first inclination was to do this chronologically. The “T” would be inspired by her 2006 debut album’s font, the “H” would be pulled from 2008’s Fearless’ font, and so on. However, after getting it all laid out it just didn’t feel right. The first few characters felt too thin, the script “S” felt odd, and the “t” and the “o” both set in the font from the folklore and evermore albums felt redundant next to each other.
My solution? Lose that logic and mix up the order of the fonts to create a logo that felt balanced despite the chaos of this style. I also took liberties. I played with the scale of characters, beefed up the thickness of the “S” to give it more weight, and added cut out backgrounds to one character in each word to really bring it home.
At this point in the design process however panic sets in, I stop as I’m struck with another realization... I kind of dig this music!
To finish the logo we needed to lockup “Taylor Swift” to “The Eras Tour.” Going with the theme of authentic and DIY my initial thought was to use her signature but upon seeing it I realized it’s not super legible. The next idea was to use her handwriting and I found a nice sample I could draw from on the back cover of the re-recorded 1989 album. While legible this didn’t feel right either as it felt too playful.
Feeling a tad stuck at this point I took a quick 5 minute break.
Upon coming back to my desk with a somewhat clearer mind I had the thought that a simpler, cleaner font with a little bit of grit would do the trick for this logo.
I looked back at the 1989 albums for inspiration and thought something like “Taylor’s Version” on the re-recording would be great. Jake Giltsoff’s suggested font of Moonblossom worked perfectly. I added some generous tracking and beefed up the weight of the font just a tad and locked it up with “The Eras Tour.”
I could totally be wrong on this, but I felt that her name didn’t need to be giant like in the original. Keeping it smaller and tracked out helps with the balance of the logo while keeping legibility.
The last piece was to turn the logo back to its original 1 color sepia glory. I explored some other color palettes but ultimately enjoyed the warmth and nostalgia this color palette brings to the table.
The final version:
All in, I spent about 1.5 hours building this redesigned logo. If I step back and try to look at this logo from the outside and critically here are my thoughts…
Pros:
- Definitely eye-catching
- Fun play on typography
- Intrinsically linked to Taylor’s discography
Cons:
- Could be perceived as off brand
- Could possibly upset fans of punk and fans of Taylor Swift
Maybe in some alternate universe this logo is thriving!
Taylor, let us know what you think. Happy to send over the AI file and whatever else you need.
