Studio Practice: OUGD504 - Studio Brief 02

This week I have been given the brief called "logostarter"

For this brief I will creating a completely new designed logo and two branding methods to accompany my design.

My work and branding will be for a certain media based project which I will be able to choose from the website
'KickStarter'.Kickstarter is a web service for crowd funding projects, products and businesses.

I will be producing the a logo and some branding work for one of the projects listed on this website, so firstly I will research the website and decide on a project that suits me best.

After researching a few different projects and business, I found one that I know I can work well with.

'People I've Loved'

"People i've loved is a small print shop based in Oakland, California, working together to make art objects that inspire human interaction and hope for our shared future. We specialise in home goods, prints and greeting cards with a focus on positivity, productivity and communication."

After completing the study task for this brief I now know the requirements for the logo.
I had to think on the illustrative yet simple side of things. Looking at the businesses work I have to create something simple yet not as modernistic as most of the designs that are around today. There needs to be a little personality behind the logo.

When sketching a few ideas out, i decided to use a more illustrative design, so I used symbols like the heart and the plus sign, because these two symbols represent positivity.

As blunt as my sketches are, I did eventually make something that I thought would work for the business. By using the shape of a heart and distorting/changing it somehow to make it more effective.

I wanted to change the shape by using text which happens to be a short description of the 'people i've loved' and using this to fill up the shape of the heart, replacing the block colour that is originally there, I also had the idea of adding some kind of border because text can look lost when it is alone, and then adding the name of the business somewhere around the main image.. So taking my sketched idea I worked on the design.

I began by taking a simple heart shape and used the cutting tool to take away some pieces of the shape to make a more boxed looking heart shape, I did this to resemble paper and card. I then used my shape as a guide to redesign it with the informational text, which I used in the font 'apple chancery/chancery' to give a more illustrated look, then followed with simple curved lines to form a light border. Then when adding the actual name 'people i've loved', I used my favourite font 'armata'. and then experimented around the main image to see where it would look best.

Below is the digital design

However after a short while i became unhappy with this design, I felt it was too formal and honestly did not turn out that interesting to look at, and going back to my 'logo requirements' i didn't feel it fit in well with what was needed to make this design successful.

So I went back to that start and designed something new.

This time I wanted to design something that looked hand illustrated yet would fit in to the mainstream logo designs that we have today. I thought that my first design lacked boldness and impact. I decided to keep the heart design because it will look effective in the right settings. So this time I worked on making a better border or backing design that would resemble an organic illustrative design yet would give an impact.

I worked on my logo requirements and I recreated the first logo below

I definitely think this design is much more successful than the first. The shaping that I made is to resemble what 'people i've loved' is about, making positive designs that are not perfect, which is why the heart design and the backing are slightly broken, but i tried my best to make it look as effective as possible. The new design also gave me a better way to include the name of the business in the logo without making it look odd or out of place.

I have decided to keep the design in black and white, to fit in with the general colour pallet that 'people i've loved' work with, and I think it works well with my design.

Now that I have my logo I can begin to apply this to different branding techniques.

I thought that since this business is still quite young, promotion will be a definite choice at some point. So I decided to apply my logo design in different ways to t-shirts.

To adapt to different coloured tops, because the logo has been made in black and white, it can easily be inverted to suit black/white/coloured backgrounds.

This idea would be useful for promotional work.

As well as this it would probably be a good idea to apply the logo to posters and business cards.

I love how the posters have turned out, expanding the logo to break the boundaries of the page and work the name of the business around that. I think the black and white works so well for my design as posters. Simple but bold, and I feel I have achieved the requirements in this branding also.

Below are my final business card designs