OUGD 503 - Individual practice - corporate design

Ive been using the 99 designs website recently to do some quick one or two day projects, they're good to do because although they have a quick turn around you need to do a lot of back ground research to come up with a relevant piece of design. Most of the projects I have done for this module have consisted of illustration based work so i thought for this brief I should go for some branding or more specifically corporate branding. This is something that is relatively new to me so would be slightly more of a challenge. The brief I selected only had a couple days left on it when I started so I had to work fast and dedicate that time solely to the brief.
I had to come up with a new logo for a successful building company that had aspects oulined in the brief that I had to meet.

Logo brief

This was the basic information given to me on the brief, I liked how they gave the values to communicate on a sliding scale because it was then left down the designers interpretation what to come up with. I took into consideration all things that they wanted and started to make a brainstorm from that

I thought about all aspects of they're company and how I could represent this, because it was for a corporate design there is a different way to go about it. They were looking for they're compant yo be represented within the logo design.
I didnt want to go down the route of stylised typeface as the logo because I felt this didnt particually fit with they're business. The other options I had left were an image that would be recognisable the that company or an image that would represent the company. I felt the representation option was best because there is a lot you can do with a building company. They wanted a classic design as oposed to a modern one which I felt was one of the hardest aspects of the brief as I felt it was somewhat conflicting with the simple side of the brief.

One of the firsts things I did after looking at the brief was to have a look at they're website, what the existing logo looked like and what sort of buildings the company built.

REI construction

Looking at the buildings in they're portfolio all seemed to have a similar style, they were all very corporate with classic elements put into them so I felt using something like this in the logo would work.

I did some research on existing corporate logo design to see what sort of styles were implicated. I also looked at images of things I could use from my brain storm.

My logo design was also helped by looking at what other people had done that had already posted on the competition page. Some were genuinely terrible but you came across a well thought out design every now and again.

My next step was to start drawing out some designs to see which would initially work well, I used some of the ideas I got from the brainstorm and worked from there.

After this I decided to start designing digitally to see which worked best as a logo, I would mean I could develop further and easier and also start to play around with type and colour.

These were some of my initial digitised designs, the orange colour for the logo was actually specified in the original brief, looking back it is something I would have probably experimented further with. Choosing a typeface was one of the longest processes, I wanted something that was strong and bold which would represent the safety within the company. I was looking at serif fonts to fit with the classic aspect of the brief. 

These were some of my final designs which I felt showed a very considered approach to the brief, I had taken into account every part of the brief and thought I had a relatively good chance of winning. 

Before submission I selected the designs I felt worked the best and mocked them up onto a business card to show how they would look if they were to be printed. 

I felt the cards had more impact in grey plus I thought that this colour represented the stone they work with on the buildings so it would be an extra connection added.

These were the final designs I submitted which I was happy with, I felt the typeface fitted the design and the brief I also thought that the shapes were relevant to what the project was asking for. Sadly I didnt win which was disappointing but considering there were over 3000 entries it was hardly surprising.

This was the winning entry, which I dont think is terrible but I dont feel it takes into every aspect of the brief. I thought the use of the colour though was good, the blue is probably something that swung it for them.

I found a video to finish of this project that was really interesting, it was just talking about how they came to design the Brazil olympic logo and the work that went into it.