All Work

Brand / Logo Design

Capital Candy.

The Capital Candy Jar had an interesting starting point: a Capitol building, a candy jar, a bald eagle. But the logo wasn't doing anything with it. Everything felt pasted together. This was a student project to redesign it from scratch: find the concept hiding in those elements and build something that actually held together.

Solo Project Logo Design Brand Identity Student Work
Capital Candy final logo mark: a chocolate-dipped strawberry with bald eagle wings and head, rendered in dark brown and red, with the words Capital Candy arched above

The Problem

A logo that couldn't decide what it was.

The original Capital Candy Jar logo had all the right ingredients and none of the cohesion. There was a Capitol building icon, a candy jar, a star, and an American flag swoosh dropped into a corner for good measure. Each element pulled in a different direction. The type was heavy, the composition was crowded, and the overall effect was busy without being interesting.

The assignment was clear: modernize the brand. Make it feel like somewhere you'd actually want to go. The goal wasn't to keep what existed and tidy it up. It was to find the real concept and build from there.

The original Capital Candy Jar logo: a Capitol building icon beside the words 'The Capital Candy Jar' in red and blue, with an American flag motif in the upper right corner. Busy and unfocused.

The original logo. Lots of elements, no clear hierarchy.

Process

Thumbnails first. Then thumbnails again.

The process started with a stack of quick sketches, trying to find a concept worth developing. Early directions explored candy jars, wrapped candies, stars, and eventually eagles. None of them clicked on their own.

The break came when the two biggest threads merged: the bald eagle for the capital, the candy store's actual product. A chocolate-covered strawberry as the eagle's body. Wings and tail feathers off the strawberry, eagle head on top. The concept was specific to this business in a way that a jar or a flag never would have been.

A sheet of 12 hand-drawn logo thumbnail sketches exploring different directions: candy jars, wrapped candies, stars, and in the bottom row, early explorations of an eagle-candy hybrid concept

Early thumbnails. The eagle concept starts to emerge in the bottom row.

The first digital versions took the concept too literally. Too many details, too many colors, talons holding a lollipop, a banner across the top. It read like a band logo or a T-shirt graphic, not something that could live on a storefront or a business card.

Thumbnail Refinement

An early black and white digital sketch showing the strawberry-eagle concept: a strawberry body with spread wings on either side, rough and unrefined

The concept locked in sketch form.

First Digital Attempt

Two early digital versions of the logo showing an over-illustrated eagle-strawberry hybrid with brown wings, a red strawberry body with green leaf, golden stars, talons, and in the left version, a lollipop held in one claw. Far too complex and detailed for a logo.

Good concept, wrong execution. Too detailed to function as a logo.

The problem was that a logo needs to work small. At favicon size, at embroidery scale, printed on a bag. All that detail collapses. So the direction shifted: keep the concept, lose the illustration. Build it from simple, symmetrical shapes that hold together at any scale.

A significant amount of time went into the wings and tail feathers specifically. The simplified forms needed to read as both feathers and an eagle in silhouette without leaning on detail to do the work.

A exploration sheet showing different wing and tail feather shape options: from detailed segmented feathers in pink and teal on the left, to progressively simpler angular forms, to small rounded tail feather options in brown, red, white, and black on the right

Wing and tail feather explorations. The goal was a form that read as feathers without needing to illustrate every one.

The Mark

Simple enough to scale. Specific enough to remember.

The final logo is symmetrical and mark-first: a chocolate-dipped strawberry body at the center, spread eagle wings on either side, and the eagle's head on top. The strawberry's rounded form creates the natural silhouette of a bird in flight. The wordmark sits in an arc above, set in HWT Artz, a typeface with enough weight and personality without tipping into novelty.

A condensed alternate mark handles small applications. Same concept, compressed for caps, pins, or anywhere the full mark wouldn't fit.

The final Capital Candy logo mark: a chocolate-dipped strawberry with spread eagle wings and an eagle head, with 'Capital Candy' set in a bold arched wordmark above. Dark brown, red, and medium brown colorway.
The alternate compact Capital Candy mark: a simplified version showing just the strawberry crown and tail feathers beneath the arched wordmark, designed for small applications like caps or pins

Primary mark and compact alternate. Both use the same shapes. The alternate strips back to the essential read.

Color & Type

Pulled straight from the subject matter.

The palette came directly from the concept. Dark feather brown from a bald eagle, strawberry red from the fruit itself, and a lighter milk chocolate tone that bridges the two. Nothing arbitrary.

Hover each swatch to see the name and hex value.

The typeface is HWT Artz, a display face with enough character to match the mark without competing with it. Set in an arc, it gives the logotype the kind of lockup that works on a sign, a bag, or a storefront equally well.

Type specimen showing 'CAPITAL CANDY, THE CANDY CAPITAL' set in HWT Artz typeface, a bold condensed display font in dark brown, with 'HWT ARTZ' labeled in the lower right corner
HWT Artz Display / Wordmark

Variations

One mark, multiple contexts.

A logo needs to hold up in situations you can't always predict. These variations cover the core use cases: brand color backgrounds for packaging and apparel, a single-color silhouette for print, and a standalone red version for light surfaces.

On Red

Capital Candy logo in black on a red background, showing the silhouette version for brand color applications

On Brown

Capital Candy logo in black on a medium brown background, the Milk Chocolate brand color

Red on White

Capital Candy logo in red on a white background, for light surface applications

Black Silhouette

Capital Candy logo as a pure black silhouette for single-color print applications

Reflection

What this project taught me about logos.

This was one of my earlier logo projects, and the biggest thing it clarified was the difference between illustration and identity design. The first round of digital work looked fine at full size. It fell apart at any other size. A logo isn't a graphic you zoom in on. It's something that has to communicate instantly, at a distance, in one color if necessary.

The concept has to do the work

The strawberry-eagle merge worked because it was specific and earned. Two symbols that independently made sense for this brand, combined into one form. That's the kind of concept that holds up over time.

Simplicity is a technical constraint, not an aesthetic preference

Logos live at small sizes, in one color, embroidered, printed on packaging with no budget. The simplification from the first digital round to the final mark wasn't about taste. It was about function. The detail had to go because it wouldn't survive real use.

Recognition means something when you earn it the hard way

The project won Graphis New Talent Gold. For a student project, that was real confirmation the concept landed beyond the classroom. More than the award, working through why the first direction failed was the part that stuck.