Dead Kiss were a metal band on the Pacific Northwest circuit. They wanted one mark that would carry the band everywhere a working band needs to appear — a shirt, a banner behind the drum kit, a CD insert, a social avatar. The name does a lot of the work on its own, so the brief was really about restraint: how much menace do you draw before it tips into costume.
I put four directions on one sketch page in September. All four leaned horror. Dripping, eroded caps. A thin spiked gothic with concave strokes. A rough two-line stack. And a shaded skull with the band name carved into a banner across the brow, which was the most finished drawing on the page and the one I liked least.
I threw all four out. The skull was the problem in miniature — every metal band reaches for one, so a skull says the genre rather than the band, and it drags a logo toward illustration when what was needed was a mark. The dripping and eroded treatments had the same weakness from the other side: texture like that reproduces badly small, and it dates to whichever year it was drawn. If the mark was going to feel dangerous, the letters themselves had to do it.
So the final is pure letterform. "DEAD KISS" in hard angular caps with sheared terminals, no curves anywhere, leaning fractionally forward. Two tapered blades sweep out of the wordmark and rise to the upper corners, one from the shoulder of the D and one from the final S, so the whole thing sits in a shallow V with a wingspan far wider than the type. A single spike drops below the baseline from the centre. A contrasting keyline runs inside every letter, which is what makes the shapes read as cut metal rather than flat black, and what lets the same artwork work positive or reversed.
That wingspan is the mark's best feature and its weak point. The blades taper to almost nothing at the tips, and the inline is a hair width, so both are the first things to disappear when the logo gets small or the ink spreads. I drew a reduced lockup at 220 pixels and put it on the master sheet next to the full version, so anyone placing it had a tested small size rather than scaling the big one down and losing the detail. I delivered vector AI plus black and white EPS and PNG variants — black letters with the keyline knocked out for pale grounds, white letters with a dark keyline for dark ones — so a shirt could be printed in a single pass.
Six weeks passed between that sketch page and the delivered vector in November 2013. I have no record of what the band printed. The garment image below is a mockup I built later to check the mark at chest width, not a photograph of a shirt that exists.
