OUGD 602 - 31 DAYS OF LOGO, background and development

Ive always wanted to do a brief that had a running content with a constrain on the amount of time you would do the brief for, I feel its a good way of producing quite a high volume of work with project running in conjunction with all your others. I chose to do a brief on logo design because I find logos very interesting. Its the first thing along with a name you would associate with a company, after a logo for a company has been established you can even take the name out and the company will still be recognisable. Good logo design can often take a long time to come up with something solid but other times it could be the first thing that comes to you. The part about logo design that really interests me is how they reflect a company within just one image, shapes and colours usually play a massive part in this stage of design.

in terms of colour when used in the correct context

red represents strength
blue represents reliably and trust
green represents eco friendly
ect...

for this specific brief I thought about rebranding a logo a day to see if I could make it better or worse, I found this to be a very hard route to go down because there has been so much money put into creating a brand image for a company it is unlikely im going to provide anything that has any substance behind it. through my research and recent memory I learnt that Pepsi had done a rebrand of their logo which cost $1.

I cant deny that their new logo does look more modern without actually changing what the original logo and the brand represents, there is a lot of indepth design around this logo that draws on things like Feng Shui, the Renaissance, the earth’s Geodynamo, the theory of relativity, and some other stuff. This is just an example of the thought that goes into a logo, particually when its for such an established company. I personally fail to believe these things actually matter in terms of Pepsi, I think any new logo which was similar to this would have had the same effect on there company as this $1 one did, purely because its something new, and people like things that are new.

After discovering rebranding a logo a day would be more hassle than its worth I decided I could use a random word generator to give me the name of a 'company' which I would just create a design for each day. This is also quite difficult as there is nothing to start with, just a name that often doest fit with the company. I needed somewhere there was a brief to work from that replicated how it would be to create a logo in a working environment, that why I chose the website 99 designs.

Ive entered various competitions on 99 designs over the years mainly down to trying to earn a bit of extra money, soon you realise the best design doesn't win because most people know nothing about graphic design or brand image, its a very frustrating site to work with because a lot of the competitions come down to a decision made through a group of people who know nothing. On the other hand though the website is good because it has an abundant supply of briefs for all areas of graphic design which I could use for this project. The briefs often come with a basic idea of what they want along with the colour they want, the rest is usually up to the designer, I felt this was perfect for my project because it meant I had to stick to a brief as well as working to a time frame that was a day for each brief, sometime it would only take me an hour or so to create a logo because you could gather a really strong brand image, other times it took the best part of a day.

I also liked working from a brief because it means you can make a logo work specifically for that company but using colour, shape and hidden meaning.

With this project I tried to keep a balance of corporate logo design which is frankly soul destroyingly boring and logo design for the more independent companies, the reason behind this is I wanted a body of work that would represent me as a designer and show that I can be adaptable to all areas of logo design. I tried with the more corporate briefs to include some interesting ideas and hidden meanings rather that the obvious ticks and gradients you might often see.

there was an interesting project that was to re-design Yahoos logo for 30 days, its quite interesting seeing the different variations that can be achieved by just changing the font, in a sense its similar to what google often do on a daily basis with there google art where a certain day will see a change in there homepage logo.

Yahoo, 30 logos in 30 days

For this brief there wasnt too much development for the actual logos, I tried to keep many of them true to the 99 designs briefs and work quickly. If I didnt like how a logo turned out I would often go back to it to see ow I could improve it without altering the entire image.