Joe Johnston Talks About Having To Create The STAR WARS Logo in Less Than 24 Hours

There was a lot of great and fascinating information that came out of the Light & Magic panel at Star Wars Celebration.

Light & Magic is an upcoming six-part doc coming to Disney+ which was developed by Lawrence Kasdan and it tells the story of the early days of Industrial Light & Magic, when a small ragtag team of VFX artists was creating Star Wars.

Kasdan was part of the panel and he was joined by Janet Lewin, Ron Howard, Joe Johnston, Phil Tippett, and Denis Muren.

During the panel, director and VFX artist at ILM Joe Johnston shared the story of how he came up with the iconic Star Wars logo. It was a rush job, and he was tasked with coming up with it in less than 24 hours.

The host of the panel said: “Something else they needed to do before that first movie could come out, they needed that original Star Wars logo.” He then called on Johnston to tell that story and how that whole thing played out:

“Gary Kurtz has come to me one late afternoon and he had a design for this Star Wars logo, and it was on one line, it was very thin hairline layers with pointed… the ends on the W and everything and he was sort of in this panic, and he said, ‘we need this tomorrow. We already shot the rollup and now we need the logo that goes away in the opening shot.’ He said ‘can you fix it?’ And I said, ‘I can’t fix it, but I can redesign it.’ And he said, ‘well, you have until ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’”

“So, I basically drew with a ruling pen and a ruler and black ink what I thought the design should look like. But, instead of putting it on one line, I stacked the Star on top of Wars and that’s the way it ended up.”

He then joked, “If I only had one penny for every time that thing has been printed… I don’t think I would be here right now.”

I can’t wait to watch this doc series! It’s going to be filled with so much great information!