Logo Idea - Cells

As one of my ideas for the logo type I thought of including biological cells to create the letterforms.

One of the key aspects of almost every zombie film is that the zombie-ness is passed from person to person as an infection of some kind. So with that in mind I wanted to look at bacteria and viruses and blood cells. I only did this very briefly, looking at the structures of cells and remembering most of the basic stuff from GCSEs.

My original design ideas were like this:

From this design idea i started looking at bacteria, and created this vector bacteria cell and its differently coloured buddy:

From here, I lost the tail and tried to fit the cells in different orientations into a Century Gothic Z.

It worked ok, but you can see from the manipulated Z how different it really is from the original. 

Anyway, I did the entire word and then took away the Century Gothic type behind:

I think this design is ok, but then I re-looked at the manipulated Century Gothic Z above and saw that it could work as a whole word. 

The idea behind this is that it isn't as though the bacteria cells just make up the letterform or and on top of it, but that they are actually inside it, infecting it. 

I think this is quite a cool idea, but I don't know how effective it really is as a logo for the festival. Obviously it doesn't have any other type around it yet, but the word 'zombie' is the main focus, the other words just put it in context. 

One of my other ideas was to use blood cells instead of bacteria cells. The zombie history is very much to do with blood, but I thought I could use cells to create a less obvious violence than the classic dripping blood that is used all the time. 

I started by putting it into the whole word:

And then vectoring the design and colouring with bold red blood colours:

I didn't think much of the coloured in version, so I took it back a bit and used less saturated colours and got rid of the outline:

I like these designs, but I'm worried that the fact that they are blood-cells doesn't really come across and that it just looks a bit like a bloody mess, exactly what I don't want it to be. I may have to reconsider this direction.