Bruce Lee 80th Anniversary
November 27th, 2020 was Bruce Lee’s 80th birthday. To commemorate this milestone birthday, the Bruce Lee Family Company, run by Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon Lee, wanted to created a special logo and artwork. As the in-house Senior Graphic designer at the Bruce Lee Family Company, I was tasked with leading the art direction and design of the 80th Anniversary Logo.
To truly capture the spirit of Bruce Lee, Shannon wanted to use the design of the dragon carved into the front of Bruce Lee’s incredible desk that he designed himself. I took pictures of the desk front and we worked with illustrator Bernard Chang to create the full dragon illustration.
Picture of the Dragon Carving on the front of Bruce Lee’s custom designed desk
Illustration by Bernard Chang
Then, I took the flat artwork from the illustrator and created a vector version. We needed the artwork to be scalable for multiple uses across products, digital assets, and printed assets. During this process I streamlined the illustration, eliminating some of the more ornate elements to create version of the dragon art which could be used in multiple sizes and retain the core elements of the art from Bruce Lee’s desk.
After vectorizing and streamlining the dragon artwork, I began the process of creating several logo versions featuring the dragon. I used the iconic Bruce Lee brand colors black and yellow as the base for all the logo work. First, I created the main 80th logo, focussing on the iconic dragon head, creating a simple clean logo. I then incorporated more of the dragon artwork and the arrows from Bruce Lee’s core symbol to create an ornate 80th logo. Finally, I turned the large dragon artwork into commemorative artwork. With these three versions of the 80th Anniversary Dragon we were able to work with a variety of licensees to create iconic products and collaborations for Bruce Lee’s 80th birthday.
Ultimately, we also decided to create timeless versions of the 80th Logos and took out the 80th Anniversary verbiage and added “The Dragon” to the logos and artwork. This way the logos and artwork can be used for years to come!
A selection of products from the Bruce Lee Store, Official Licensees, and Collaborations using the 80th Anniversary Logo and The Dragon Logo:
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