Brief4_Loco

Loco Dominic Rugman Brief 4 | Loco Collab | Oliver Cassell

1|4

| OUGD301

Loco is an up and coming club night in Leeds. Heavily focused on experimental house music and electronic beats, the client wanted an aesthetic that reflected the nature of the night across a variety of media.

The brief was to create a fully fledged identity for the event starting early next year. The identity had to be fitting for the night however it is also likely to move on and form a record label, becoming a strong force in the Leeds electronic music scene. Thus needing an appropriate, professional identity.

Creating an identity for something as experimental and creative as this night intends to be, we felt the artwork was as important as the branding in order to capture a relevant audience and stand out from all the other regurgitate fly posts spread around Leeds. As this was the case, we split the design process between the branding and artwork, with Oli focusing on the logo while I took charge of the artwork production.

The concept behind the overall aesthetic stems from the use of pattern and grid. House music has a very repetitive time signature producing a structured feel to the underlying beats, however the night is entitled ‘LOCO’ and is focused on experimental house music, which naturally asks for a more experimental visual response.

The initial artwork experiments (center left) are based on a set of brain pattern scans, created using a 2:1 ratio modular grid. Working with them for a while they started to feel slightly flat, at which point I decided to introduce a 3D perspective grid and work with the individual letters of the name LOCO. I wanted to keep the letters simple allowing the 3D element to do the work visually.

This approach received a positive response from both Oli and the crit feedback, encouraging me to continue experimenting with this visual and start applying type and layout.

Loco Dominic Rugman Brief 4 | Loco Collab | Oliver Cassell

2|4

| OUGD301

We still wanted to incorporate the idea of pattern, particularly brain patterns as we felt it bared relevance to the nature of the night, with dance music heavily stimulating the ‘motor’ part of the brain.

After a lengthy exploration period with the artwork, I created a more abstract pattern using the outline shapes and forms from the 3D LOCO manipulated in various ways.

As the shape I was working with didn’t tessellate in any way, I pieced together mass amounts of the shape, individually rotating and fitting them together, ensuring I kept an adequate amount of white space between each piece. This worked fairly well, particularly once colour was applied. As evident in the final variations to the left, I experimented with scale, colour and stroke in order to create a breadth of designs based around a sole visual.

The colour pallet was very important to keep consistent.

We wanted to make sure vibrancy was key, although didn’t want to swamp designs with an unconsidered medley of colour. The scheme is taken from a ‘Cream’ advertisement used in the early nineties, picking swatches from the original posters and tweaking them to our preference. Once the colour pallet was established we were able to pick and choose certain colours without the worry of an unorganized overall aesthetic.

Conduit ITC Pro is the typeface used for the artist line up on the event flyers, which also stems through to other printed matter such as record sleeves and eventually the printed collateral for the curator of the event, Ross Muir.

As the identity spans over to web, the replacement typeface family would most likely consist of Arial bold for headline text and helvetica for body copy.

Loco Dominic Rugman Brief 4 | Loco Collab | Oliver Cassell

3|4

| OUGD301

The digital and online presence of the event is just as important as the printed matter at this stage of its life.

Mainly used for promotion and causing hype around the event we wanted to make sure most of the general aspects were addressed.

As mentioned before, the event is likely to turn into a record label, therefore needing a comprehensive online presence that integrates seamlessly with the printed matter allowing instant recognition for the user.

The homepage makes use of the 3D LOCO artwork, amplified and cropped into a header that runs across the website, blog and Facebook presence.

I designed the website with a heavy influence from the idea of an underlying grid system. Using a basic square format, the visual for each homepage post appears in a square, heavily cropped in to distort the visual until the user rolls over the image, at which point it becomes more legible.

The client wanted a similar, but distinctive visual identity to run through a mixtape series that will be released online each month. Many similar mixtape series can be quite bland, simply using the brand name and mixtape number. I thought of using a side name for the online mixes called ‘The Loco Files’, it’s a page dedicated in the downloads section to all of the mixes generated by the in house DJ’s. The three visuals bottom right are variations for the mixtape visuals, with the name of the artist and ‘LOCO File’ number changing with each release.

The app again makes use of the same visual as the website, ensuring a visual consistency is achieved.

The app content is essentially a condensed version of the website, offering pages for a simple blog, downloads and future line-ups.

The background is a crop from the large 3D LOCO artwork. As the user explores the app, certain sections of the colour stay constant while each background colour changes corresponding to the section selected.

Loco Dominic Rugman Brief 4 | Loco Collab | Oliver Cassell

4|4

| OUGD301

The printed collateral pictured above start to bring together the physical identity of the night and touch on elements of the brand as it moves on to forming a record label.

T-shirts are a staple deliverable of most record labels in this day and age, using customers and fans as walking advertisements for the brand, again creating that element of hype, particularly as they will be released prior to the event launch.

Vinyl stickers have been created using the LOCO artwork for records released on the label. The clean vibrant colour used for the sleeve is an attempt to keep a more professional element within the identity as the brand branches out and starts to sell records in shops and online.

Although not in keeping with the colour scheme, the wristbands would be used for entrants into the club night. The reason behind the vibrancy of the stock ensures a reaction to UV lights in the club, illuminating the wrists of people dancing expanding on and reiterating the visuals used for promotion.