One of the things I struggled with in setting up the Harvey Mercheum was the logo. I am not a graphic designer, so it was a challenge for me to come up with something simple yet distinctive. I did not want to use any copyrighted characters or material from Harvey, I needed something original. For the final product, I drew inspiration from the comics without actually copying anything from them.

The first Richie Rich comic I owned was Inventions #1, which was published in October of 1977 but which I acquired during the summer of 1978. At the time, Harvey comics had a colored band on the front cover along the spine, with all black text repeating the title and tag line of the comic (you can see it on the Grand Comics Database here). But by the start of 1979, the title by the spine was changed to a color outlined in black to make it stand out even more. It is this style, specifically Inventions #11, that I chose to emulate.

The next step was to choose the color palette. I went with a more subdued blue, and then adjusted it to be “web safe”. The result is Danube Blue (hex #6699CC). I stuck with pure black (hex #000000) and yellow (hex #FFFF00) as they were already “safe”.

The last step was to choose a font. The closest I could find was Gill Sans MT Condensed. Using that font, I worked with the point size and kerning to make the title and tag line as close to the same length as I could.

I am satisfied with the result, I feel it pays homage to the Harvey style while still being uniquely mine. What do you think?