Leeds Loves Creativity (Logo Development)

The Leeds Love brief is interesting. Although at first it seems you have a lot of freedom in terms of design, the reality is, your restricted with colour pallet, imagery and typeface. Looking throught the brand guidelines PDF sent out - it was obvious to me rite away that the pictorgram was the focus of the design, and had to give the audience some sort of idea what they are looking at. For example the 'Leeds Loves Shopping' indentity is the type set inside a label - simple yet effective design.
Below I have taken my design in the same direction. I wanted an object (tool of the trade) which people would immediatley assosiate with the creative industry. As you have seenn ,my initial concepts were based around digitial art, using a mac as the pictogram. However i did not want 'creativty' to be linked with the digital media as a whole.
The design below show my initial concepts in a digital form, without the use of colour at this stage. Because the existing identitys hold the type inside the image, i was scared to go away from this technique, although it seems to make the piece stronger, and that little bit more creative when i do so.

I liked the idea of using a pencil as the image, as most great art start with pencil / pen to paper. Although i found the design left a lot of white space, which you do not see with the other designs. The paint brush seemed a stronger direction, although i feel the location of the type needs to be experimented with.