30 Impressive Logos Illustrating The Meaning Of Words By Playing With Negative Space

"The first wordmark I designed was the watch. I was experimenting—I still am—with ways to explore my creativity and to entertain my audience," explained Sander the inspiration behind his series of wordmarks. "Later, when I started to incorporate negative spaces into the designs, I noticed that people really like clever designs that take a moment to discover the 'hidden' message and started a series where I try to create a new one every other post."

As it turns out, Sander does not plan wordmarks, but it rather just comes to him naturally: "It's often just a word that pops into my head or I sit down and generate a lot of random words using an online tool. The thing is that you never know if a word and the space between its letters will allow you to create a nice recognisable picture inside."

Sander continued: "What I just mentioned is probably the hardest part. I try so many different words before I arrive at something that I know for sure would be a success. I don't want to create something that is just mediocre. Some words are simply not suitable for what I'm trying to achieve."

"What makes this difficult is keeping balance between the positive space (the typography in this case) and the negative space. While it's not hard to incorporate a negative space element, it's actually maintaining the right font weight and readability of the word what makes is hard."

We've asked Sander if he has a favorite in this series and he had this to say:

"I would say the second dragon wordmark is still my favourite. This was an actual challenge compared to popular wordmarks like 'four' which wasn't difficult to execute. It was incredibly satisfying to come up with something that I didn't expect to work at first. An example is how the negative space under the r finished the design because it's almost like its spitting fire. You get these nice and lucky discoveries sometimes."

We've also asked Sander if he has anything planned for the upcoming designs, but as stated previously, he doesn't plan these things. "Now is a rather busy time for me and I'm finishing a client project soon that I plan to post next. Then, I will see whatever pops into my head to create a wordmark with."

Be sure to follow Sander on his Instagram page for more creative wordmark goodness. But this list doesn't end here so be sure to check out the rest of his designs below and to vote on the ones you loved the most!