5 minute read
DEVELOP
Idea development
Initial sketches
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The next step was to start producing ideas. During this stage I sketched up my ideas in Adobe Illustrator. I really enjoyed this process as it was a free flow activity, letting my mind respond to the proposal. My aim was to show dynamic and liveliness in special focus of the heartbeat motif. I have carried out further research regarding how else I could represent heartbeat rather than an ECG line.
I spent about a day on generating these initial ideas in order to be able to show different options to my group and have them ready as a starting point. I tried a few possible routes. One was to approach the heartbeat as a sound and that took me to research vibe and its visualisation.
Another route was to combine the heartbeat with maritime themes, so I created some initial sketches about this idea too. When the group looked at it, they found that the museum front idea could work the best out of these, so they advised me to start developing that further. They liked the spiral drawing (Figure 39) too, but it wasn’t as strong as the museum front with the heart idea.
Colours are random, not considered at this stage. I picked blue shades mostly because of the maritime theme and because they complement the orange in the Poole Museum logo.
Figure 34.: Poole Museum front. Figure 35.: Museum front drawing developed further to draw out a folded heart shape. An attempt to combine the heartbeat notion with the home & harbour theme.
Figure 36.: A very literal approach of combining heart and wave, mostly for fun. Figure 37.: Idea generation around the vibe idea. The dashed heart shape only included to show the process.
Figure 39.: Vibe -» Wave -» ‘O” ? as in Our Museum. This idea has been dropped at a very early stage. Figure 38.: Logo idea generation. ‘Too “maritimey”, not enough “museumy”...’
Figure 40.: Heartbeat transformed to wave -» wave becoming type. We found it not legible enough. Figure 41.: (to the right): Typographic experiment to represent the notion of vibes and heartbeat.
I drew several variations based on the first drawing of the museum front. I experimented with the lines creating different shapes and how it possibly could be improved to be more contemporary.
Amongst all the artboards I created, the one on the image (Figure 44, bottom left) was the most successful within the team. They voted to take the red framed form of the logo further. I personally preferred the orange framed version where the lines of the building are converted into a heart. If it were only my call, I would have gone towards that way.
Regarding its colour palette, I felt that it was ready. The blue shades refer to maritime, while the golden colour represents history, heritage, art and the positives of being local. At this point we had a discussion with our tutor, Alice, and we advised us to rethink the colour palette. After a discussion with the team, I had been given the advice to try the logo in black and white and give blue shade to the folded heart shape.
Figure 42. (top left): I experimented with pottery colours. It felt too retro.
Figure 43. (top left): Pottery from Poole Museum.
Figure 44. (bottom left): Artboard with logo designs. My team liked this artboard the most and they picked the logo in the red frame to be developed further. The orange framed (and its variations) would have been my choice.
Figure 45.(top right): Keeping the shape itself was one of the possible routes. It hasn’t been taken further by group decision.
Figure 46. (bottom right): More experiment with the museum front. I think the result look too much architectural and “churchy”. I also played with the lines of the museum drawing to create a typeface.
Finalizing the logo and creating brand guidelines
I was looking for a font that gives character to the logo. I found the World of Water free font in my font book, which is an alt-universe, Art Nouveau style display font according to the author. It talks to creatives through its artistic attributes, who are targeted by the Our Museum Project. It also has that quirkiness which supports the logo to stand out.
As an alternative font, I chose Optima because it is versatile and serves well for both body text and titling. It is a humanist san-serif which makes it a great match to art and history related texts.
Regarding the colour palette (Figure 49), it is based on the blue shade I picked from my sketches. To create a brand which is flexible and covers all the aspects of our proposal I chose four colours and 2 gradients. I hesitated about the use of the gradient in the logo. I thought it is a brave choice that adds dynamic and life to the brand. It also stands for the sea, the vibes of the museum and for the bustling community. I did typographic experiments (Figure 1., 2.) using the gradients and the word ‘Our’. My idea was to create textures or patterns that represent notions connected to the brief. These could work as a playful element of the brand which can be applied in many varieties, giving freedom to the creatives working with the brand. Brand typefaces - Logo and display
World of Water
Brand typefaces - For use of any text (Posters, tickets, web, etc)
Optima
Figure 47.: Font sets of the brand.
Figure 48.: Examining alternative usages of the logo font. With its underlined “o” it does look like a person with shoulders, while it splits the word ‘our’ to ‘o’ and ‘ur’. ‘Ur’ is used in communication of younger audiences as a short form of the word “your”. These ideas could have been taken further to create a stronger concept.
Figure 49: Colour scheme of the blue shade we picked. I chose to use 4 of them. Figure 50.: Gradient pairs I created to see how they work out together. I choose 2 of them that work well as the final brand gradients.
