Before there was a pandemic and everything got cancelled, I used to attend a Japanese language meetup. The organizer asked me one day if I could create a logo for the group. At the time, I was studying web development but had not yet started to investigate the world of design. So I had no clue where to start, and never did it.
Fortunately, I remembered that he had asked, and decided to see if I could come up with something for him, as an exercise. Here it is:
The idea I had was simply to combine the flags for Tennessee and Japan, both of which have a large circle in the middle:
Originally I had the stars in the middle of the red circle, but it really didn’t look right. Maybe it looked less like a logo, and more like some other flag. Putting the stars off to the side seemed to fix it.
I also tried to get all of the lines of text to be the same width, but found that “Middle Tennessee” became too stretched out, unless I increased the text size. I didn’t want to do that, because “Japanese Meetup” is more important than “Middle Tennessee” (we’re all in Tennessee, so that isn’t new information).
I would call this my first successful logo attempt. I liked how it turned out, and the organizer says that he’ll use it once the pandemic is over.