Logotype Project: create/develop/expand

After writing a mission statements we were given a task to create 25 logotypes each over the next couple days. I decided to focus on the concept of ‘variety of the opinions’ doing a logo, because transferring the idea of ‘seeing what other see’ seemed to me too complicated and in certain way unreal.

Firstly, I headed up to the library to see how different designers created logos, what methods of development they used and how they transferred the ideas into a simple shapes, without loosing the original meaning. Looking through the different books inspired me a lot and gave an idea where to start and how to communicate the messages I wanted more effectively.

Creating.

As a start I took just the word ‘variety’ and played around typography, trying to encode the word using geometric shapes instead of letters. I think that it was a good idea as all of the letters took different (variety of) shapes, but remained readable.

Then I started to think about how people share the opinions and ideas which leads to the infinity of possibilities and opportunities. That’s how I came to the decision to use the infinity sign in the logo. I didn’t want to use the sign itself, because it’s too obvious, so I decided to construct it from the speech bubbles (as through talking people share the ideas).

By the deadline I had only half of the logos done and I was pretty disappointed about it, as it’s certainly says a lot about my ability to manage the time. Well, I hope it would be a nice lesson for me (do not leave everything to the last day).

Expanding.

Our tutor picked a couple of logotypes in each group and asked us to picture them on a large scale, using ink, paint and other materials. My geometric ‘variety’ was also picked (which was really nice), so we tried to expand it. I wrote it on a large pieces of paper with the sponge and black paint and achieved an interesting texture (the one you wouldn’t be able to get digitally). We then made a stencil and painted through it using a spray. That gave a nice ‘rough’ letters.

Even though it didn’t help to develop the logo, it was nice to ‘break out’ and use the materials graphic designers use rarely. I always liked mark making and I think that sometimes it can be very useful tool to bring your work to the next level.

On the next day we were asked to create our logotypes in 3D in a largest possible scale, using newspaper and masking tape only. At first we thought that building 7 geometric forms in 5 hours would be easy, but obviously we overestimated our abilities. Creating a triangle that can stand on it’s own out of newspaper is much harder than you can imagine. We ended up with only four letters, deciding to create word ‘vary’ instead. I am proud of the fact that we didn’t gave up in the middle of the day and ended up with the smiles on our faces. Not all of the groups succeeded to do this task, but there definitely were ones that were able to develop their logos through making the sculptures. As with the mark making, I enjoyed the exercise a lot as it forced us to think ‘out of the box’ and solve problems as soon as they appear.

Developing.

Over the weekends our tutor asked us to make a more or less finished and improved designs, developed through the exercises of the last week. Using the previous logos I created a number of designs in AI. In my opinion, they came out much nicer than the first ones (as they were drawn by hand), now I’ll just hope that by improving them, I was able to save their original meaning and that they are still readable for everybody (not just me).

#chelsea #graphicdesign #BAGDC #Reflection #logotype #logo #research