b o s t o n o ly m p i c s p r o c e s s b o o k
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ta b l e o f c o n t e n ts
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i n t r od u c t i o n
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r e se a r c h
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p r oc e s s
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a p p l i c ati o n s
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introduction :
photographs from wcvb.com
what is significant about boston ? So what exactly is Boston? This is what our firned wikipedia states: Boston is the capital and largest city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. Boston also serves as county seat of Suffolk County. The city proper covers 48 square miles with an estimated population of 645,966 in 2014, making it the largest city in New England and the 24th largest city in the United States.The city is the anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area called Greater Boston, home to 4.5 million people and the tenth-largest metropolitan area in the country. Greater Boston as a commuting region is home to 7.6 million people, making it the sixth-largest Combined Statistical Area in the United States. One of the oldest cities in the United States, Boston was founded
on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by Puritan settlers from England. It was the scene of several key events of the American Revolution, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Siege of Boston. Upon American independence from Great Britain, the city continued to be an important port and manufacturing hub, as well as a center for education and culture. Through land reclamation and municipal annexation, Boston has expanded beyond the original peninsula. Its rich history helps attract many tourists, with Faneuil Hall alone attracting over 20 million visitors. Boston’s many firsts include things such as the United States’ first public school, Boston Latin School (1635), and first subway system (1897).
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researching boston
field research
We focused on researching a few locations in Boston to understand the feel of the city and culture.
secondary research
We focused on looking closely at outer sources to get a good understanding of Boston.
The first part of forming the brand for the Boston Olympics was to do a variety of research which ranged from field research to secondary research. By doing this process in the beginning of the project, it helped to clearly understand what is significant about Boston. During the field research phase, we simply took a trip down to downtown Boston and nearby areas to get a feel of the city. What is the atmosphere of the city? Is there anything we can be inspired by to create our branding. In the second part of the project, we also conducted a set of secondary research which ranged from reading articles, looking at sources on the internet, and using any background knowledge
we have to identify any other information that we missed out on our field research. From the secondary research, we are able to find facts that were not present through our field research. Ideas such as specific numbers, certain historical facts and events were found through our secondary research that made our thinking switch into various directions. By looking at these two methods of research we were able to get a good background of Boston to start sketching out our ideas and brainstrom any possible ways we would be able to visualize the city. At the same time, we also considered looking at previous olympic logos and brands to get some inspiration.
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history and boston
A view around beacon hill and how it provides us a sense of history from it’s architecture.
Boston is a historical city. This was evident from our background knowledge, but it was evident from looking and walking around the city. Looking at the specific architecture of the city made us wonder if it would be evident to use this element for our final logo. At the same time, would it make sense to jump out of that boundary line and try something new? We felt like Boston is usually characterized as that historical location and not anything else. At the same time, another literal approach would be something related to sports. From thinking about these ideas, it made us wonder if our brand be a literal approach or rather abstract one?
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research :
boston international ?
what is our concept for the brand ? historical boston ?
What makes our brand significant? This was the big question we proposed when we started to think of our concept for our olympic branding. After condicting research for the project, we were drawn to the idea of Boston being historical. This was evident from the field research that we conducted, and also through various books and articles that we looked at in the secondary research phase. At the same time, would it be interesting to create a present, past and future based logo? In addition, how would we tie this concept to the whole entire idea of creating a branding for the olympic games? We felt like we were finding it difficult to tie this idea directly to the olympics.
Boston is a very international city. This was another idea we started to find through our two areas of research. When we think of Boston in a social perspective, Boston is a city of various nationalities. At the same time, it is a city that brings together different people. In other words, we want to call this a get together. This seemed to be a better concept than our first one, since it tied a bit better to the ideas of creating a logo for the actual olympic games. However, it did question another idea of similarity. Would it be strong enough to compete with other logos that were produced previously for the olympic games? Would it have it’s own originality and strength?
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”
we also like
to call boston
america ’ s college town because there are so
many students
here that the city
„
actually feels like a whole campus .
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Boston is known for being a huge city for education. It is home to a numerous amount of educational institutions which ranges from public schools, universities and colleges. In other words, some people like to call the city the Athen’s of education. Considering this idea that was found in one of our secondary research, we decided to tie this idea with
Boston is home to Harvard University, an university offering world-class education. (image: harvard.edu)
Northeastern University is also a large scale university in high quality education in Boston. (image: northeastern.edu)
the educating aspect of the olympics. While students are not alone and being supported by professors and faculty, the olympic athletes are also supported by their trainers to move forward. Putting these two ideas together, we decided to work with the concept of high quality education in Boston.
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looking at education
Before we went too deep into drawing out our ideas, we took a quick look at what the education is like in Boston. While we only looked at a bit of this in our secondary research, we wanted to see what the setting is like, as well as seeing what the environment is.
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process :
how would we visualize boston ?
photographs from dentons.com
visualize the concept
We came up with a good theme for our logo, education. Now the next problem is, how are we going to visualize this into a nice logo? Our process started off by simply creating a number of logo sketches in order to think of a good form of our logo. We didn’t limit ourselves to a certain theme, but preferred to create a number of visuals that related to the idea of education. We considered looking back on the variety of research that we did through our two methods of research and decided to focus on a good balance from them. As a result, we decided to focus on looking at some animal iconography, some things that had a literal approach, and some that were abstract. By taking the animal route, we first thought that maybe
we can communicate our ideas in a unique way that wasn’t done previously. By taking the literal route, we thought that it might have a direct way to express the spirit of Boston. Lastly, by going the abstract route, we considered the logo to have a unique feel where the logo wouldn’t have an immediate answer. Instead, it might make the viewer wonder what our logo would really mean. We spent the next week continuing to sketch, where we developed a large set of 100 sketches. As we processed our sketches we came accross different ideas which weren’t related to our first themes. We found this to be a great jump from our initial 3 ideas to express education. As we processed our sketches we found ourselves drawn to the different ideas that weren’t too focused to our initial ideas. We felt like we had a nice variety of styles from initial ones, but the 3 ideas that we considered weren’t the most strongest ones compared to the later ones we had produced.
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�
do these
sketches have
any significanct
„
meaning to the olympic games ?
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�
would these sketches be
too abstract
to express our
„
concept and the olympic games ?
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�
would these
sketches be too literal for our
„
concept and the olympic games ?
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”
wait , could we use this human element to
express the idea of education in
„
some sort of way ?
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Wait, doesn’t this have all of the things we’re looking for?
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human element
Doesn’t this express how the people are involved in the olympic games and education in Boston?
the tree of life
Doesn’t this express the growth of the students and the athletes in the Olympic Games abstractly?
the leaf
Doesn’t this remind you of how the olympics have the motif of the leaves in many circumstances?
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moving forward :
the athletes grow with the
olympics , just like the students
Working from the previous sketch of the tree of life motif and the human combined together, we decided to bring this into the next steps of production. We felt like it also had the significances of what we were looking for. While the logo expresses the atmosphere of education in Boston, it also ties the theme of “the athletes grow with the olympics, just like the students grow with the educational city”. This idea had much more significance compared to any of our other ideas, which seemed to lose the balance between what is
significant of the Olympics vs what is significant about Boston. We now decided to move forward by creating a few more versions of the human motif to see what type of style would match our brand. Would a circular style match our branding system? Or would a traingular dynamic system match the style of our logo? By creating some fresh sets of logos, we were able to understand what we need to include in our system, as well as what wouldn’t belong in our branding system.
photographs from usainbolt.com
grow with the educational city .
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How can we express the style of our logo?
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I chose to work with the traingular tree of life concept.
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But don’t we miss the original structure of the leaves too?
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Wait, there’s a way to use the two structures together!
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Structure was fused to create the leaf.
Human was kept triangular.
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the question :
what colors communicate our
concept for the boston olympics ? more colors ?
We looked at a couple of logos from previous years that utilized more than one color. We felt like this is one good direction, considering that our logo is a bit more complicated in shape and structure. By using more colors, it seemed like our logo would have more breath than working with one simple color.
less colors ?
We looked at previous logos that have a simpler tone of color. Unlike the colorful ones, they come out simple, but we felt like this was the right route. We found out that our brand would benefit from a diverse range of colors to create the logo and maintain structure.
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Can we bring in some inspiration from the rings?
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�
what would
happen if we
mirror the colors of the olympic
rings onto the
logotype of the
„
boston olympics ?
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We decided to mimic the olympic colors.
The human was kept in gray.
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type run
We started our type run phase of this project by trying to sketch out some possible layouts that can work with the actual logo. We felt like placing the logo on the top was a better idea to balance the weight of the logo.
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Avenir
We chose to work with avenir for our logo, in order to balance the weight of our logo and typography. We used the book weight of avenir to not make our typography take up too much of our logo.
ABCDEFGHIJKL MNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijkl mnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890!@#$%^&*()
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Logo was placed on the top
Olympic Rings were placed under type
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Logotype in color
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Logotype in grayscale
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applications :
what makes our brand unique ?
photographs from imgbuddy.net
what can we use ?
So now that we have a good standing logo, what’s the next step? We needed to create a good set of application items to incorporate into our branding system. Items such as tickets, posters, banners, websites needed to be designed in order to promote Olympics when it is held in Boston. For our next step, we started to question ourselves, “what makes our branding system unique?” Although we created a nice logo, we neeeded to analyze our branding system once again to find out what we can incorporate into our application items. We started to look into previous application items in order to understand how past designers were treating their applciation items with their branding system. We started to learn that maybe it’s a wise idea to have a balance between how much “logo-like” our branding
should be against how much originality we should bring into the application items themselves. From providing ourselves with a few ideas, we thought we can bring together a set of pictograms in order to produce iconic figures for our application items. By doing this, it made our brand original, but also had a connection with the actual logo itself. In order to achieve this, we chose to apply a similar system from our logo figure. We did consider using the leaves in a few areas of our application items, but not in all of them. It did provide a good sense of originality to our brand, but also made the balance between sport and education not too right. Therefore, we chose to focus on creating the pictograms from the triangular shapes that constructed our logo and used the leaves in small parts of our applications.
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the solution :
why don ’ t we apply a system of pictograms for each sport ?
Icons from Otl Aicher’s pictogram designs of 1972.
Our solution came real simple. Why can’t we produce a system of pictograms? It would be really interesting if there was a pictogram for each sport. We were very inspired by the pictograms from the 1972 olympic games, where there was a specific pictogram produced for each sport. We also noticed that this was something that was common throughout many of the olympic application systems. We looked at our logo and analyzed that there was this triangular system that constructed the human essence of the logo. Therefore, we worked with a set of iconic figures that were made purely from triangular shapes. The head was left in a diamond shape like that of the logo. The pictograms were produced for the 4 sports:
swimming, athletics, fencing and gymnastics. 4 csets of pastel colors were provided for each sport. These colors came from the lighter shades of the leaves and also matched to bring an essence of the sport. These icons were produced into a poster, ticket, and banner designs. Each of these sports would have their own applications, where they would be placed throughout Boston. Adding to the environmental graphics, these sports would have their own tickets with their own pictograms. Considering that viewers would not watch the whole entire games and choose some of the sports they want to see, the pictograms would be a good way to make the items have their own diversity and have its own characteristics.
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Developed pictogram icons.
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