A friend, and my barber at the time, was planning on moving back to Ireland and starting his own shop. At the time he worked at House of Barons, and wanted his shop to be a spin-off of the Ottawa-based shops. He saw a sketch I’d made of a cartoon plague doctor and thought it would make a great tattoo, or even a shop logo. The “Nest” part of the name, I believe, comes from the bird beak-like plague mask.
The Horizontal Wordmark
For use on cards and other long, horizontal use cases
I drew a slew of different takes on the plague doctor, from Woody Woodpecker style cartoony to more realistic to more iconic. In the end the original sketch is the one he liked best, so I vectorized it. He really liked the messiness and unstable line work of the original, and I kept some of that in, but balanced it with more clarity and legibility in certain areas.
The wordmark consists of a customized Decalled Script and Gotham Black. I ended up completely redrawing the script to make some changes to it, to both smooth out the transitions between letters and make it a bit inkier to match the illustration.
