So Very Dark

*Edit:  For some reason, when you click to make the images full size, most of them are opening really big.  I’m not sure why (if someone knows and would like to tell me, that’s cool) but all you have to do is click ‘back’ and it’ll take you back to my blog.  Sorry.

Just thought I’d share my first project from my Corporate ID class…if you aren’t interested, feel free to skip this blog.

The project:

We had to choose a company (small, preferably — well-known logos are hard to redesign) to rebrand…or alternately, if we had a friend or family member in need of logo design, we could do that.  As it turns out, my mom’s friend Lynn has a music production company that needed a logo.

I spoke with him to find out what kind of feel he was trying to give his customers to work out what the logo should ’say’.  What he wanted to portray is that music is a healing force…something that can turn a key inside a listener and open them to joy or peace or euphoria.

The first step of the project was doing a bunch of sketches for the ’wordmarks’ and ‘lettermarks’ (basically the full name of the company and the initials or initial):

(click on any image to view it full sized)

We chose in class the three of each set that everyone felt really fulfilled the needs outlined before, and so the next step was to vectorize the chosen word and lettermarks.  Also, we had to do sketches for the ‘pictoral marks’ and ‘abstract marks’  (just what it sounds like):

Pictoral Marks–

Abstract marks:

Refined lettermarks and wordmarks:

Next, of course, I had to refine the pictoral and abstract marks in the same way:

The next step was to finalize all four designs.

The Lettermark:

The wordmark:

The images still needed a little fiddling with…I needed to try them out different way, mix in some colors, otherwise see how I could make them really work.

The abstract marks — Lynn really liked the sound file idea, and my teacher liked the concept a lot too…it is simple and clean, but still expressive.  Pretty much everyone liked the other one:

As for the pictoral mark…I had a bit of a problem…I honestly didn’t like ANY of the ideas I’d developed.  I’ll be honest…the week we looked them over in class we had a substitute and he was, well, shit.  He was in a huge rush to get through everyone’s work and didn’t seem to have a great grasp on what we were doing.  That being so, I spoke to my teacher and we looked over the thumbnails again, and the one that she specifically liked was one I had a fondness for as well…something that got across the message without being blatant or ostentatious or looking like an advertisement for a birthday-party magician:

(if you can’t quite tell, it’s an owl carrying a flute)

Hurray!  Everyone I showed responded to this picture…a vast improvement over the previous choices!

So, with Briggs’ help, I narrowed it down to 6 choices of image (we decided that, while nice-ish, the sound file just didn’t have the same appeal as the other abstract) and I posted them so my mom could look at them and help me choose two final pictures (ideally, yes, I would have talked to Lynn…but he has no internet, and as this was a school project that needed to get done, and she’s familiar with his company AND has a good eye for design, she was the best choice.)

The six:

In the end, simplicity won out — the final abstract and pictoral marks:

annnnddd…. a couple where I played with mixing the images with the word and letter marks:

The end!