So, I have a long running history of asking my parents and grandpa about our family heritage and I continuously receive blank stares when I ask the question. I get a little bit out of them, but it seems the details change a little each time. The fact is, we are a little clueless about our history outside of the United States. I have a huge extended family in the Southern Illinois region, so until I fork over the money for ancestory.com, that was where my focus went for this project.

For the reasons mentioned above, this was a challenging project for me to get started on, but as I began to really think about the major points that stick out with my immediate family it started to become clear what the Vancil's role is in our larger extended Southern Illinois family. We are the hosts. My grandpa loves to cook, my dad love's to cook, and both my brother and I love to cook. We also love drinking, but I digress. Almost every major holiday is hosted at my parents house, where we all come together to eat, catch up, and have a good time. We are natural hosts and enjoy bringing people to our table to break bread.

With that said, I started brainstorming how I could bring that to life in my crest. I wanted to keep it playful and reimagine some of the traditional crest elements. I love cooking in cast iron so that is where I started. Then I began a general brain dump of other design elements that I might incorporate.

I started creating the elements in illustrator, experimenting with a few styles. Then I began dialing in the lockup and added in some color. For the color palette, I started with the neon orange. Southern Illinois is a big hunting community, and although I have never hunted (lots of family members do), the hunter orange seemed like a good backdrop as hunting ties in directly to food and cooking. It isn't quite as bright as true hunter orange, I didn't want to blind everyone.

I wanted to highlight the gritty, sandy texture of cast iron pans in the design, so for the final design I added in some sublte distress and texture.

Some additional assets created for good measure. I make a pattern for just about every logo project I work on (whether I am asked to or not!!!!!), cuz I dig em. And it looks good on an apron. May have to get some of these made for the fam. 

Here is the final lockup. I will admit it wasnt an initial intention, but that it was a happy accident that the lemon wedge contains a V in the negative space. SCORE!!!

SHWAGGGGG

Can't say how much I enjoyed this class. Not just for the awesome insight into Mr. Draplin's process, which is invaluable, but one of the biggest takeaways for me was realizing how shitty my illustrator workflow is. I need to step up my keyboard shortcut game. Thanks for letting us take a peek into your world Aaron!