Near the beginning of December I made an early entry to the Yehuda Moon headbadge contest, restricting myself to the Van Sweringen category since I normally ride a similar machine.

Looking at the other entries for the Van Sweringen, there seems to be an assumption of traditionalism or Olde Worlde-ness in both the imagery and choice of typeface. To me, this completely misses the point of  the upright, three-speed bicycle as a twentieth-century urban phenomenon, not to mention a modernist icon.

When the early roadsters were being produced there was a certain degree of marketability in the notion of heritage, of something stable and familiar in a period of increasingly rapid modernisation.

I attempted to reflect the modern Dutch heritage of the city bicycle by drawing inspiration from the neoplasticist/De Stijl movement, in particular the limited primary palette so indicative of Mondrian or Rietveld.

I went for a slightly later style of typeface, the early De Stijl efforts being a tad too square and blocky for decorative purposes.

I made a few prelimary sketches as vector drawings – looking primarily at the arrangement of  colours but with the main idea relatively concrete. It struck me immediately that an exaggerated elongated ‘S’ presented a strong visual analogy for the road. I toyed with the idea of using the lowercase ‘v’ as a headlight beam…but decided this would introduce too much of a narrative/figurative element into what was, after all, a logo.

I then worked it up in a CAD package before rendering it for the final image. In hindsight, I should probably have taken more time and curved the “badge ” to fit the headtube…

Anyway, you can pop over and vote for me – Flaneur Brian – should you feel charitable.

r:B